Ancient Whispers from Chaldea

Rating:
Summary: Listen When Chadbourne Whispers
Review: Arthyr Chadbourne is an original and when orignals speak we ought to listen, there is much to be learned from the mind of this starship. Mr. Chadbourne has researched and unlocked keys of precise timing based on the knowledge Babylonian astrologers/astronomers learned from their years of observation and calculations. Mr Chadbourne's sunset chart hypothesis is, as he states, "a unique and bold idea of astrology." In adjusting his knowledge of ancient ideas to modern knowledge, Mr. Chadbourne leads us down no ordinary garden path; rather it is one of dynamic growth, and learning, much like the Babylonian idea of finding the date and time for any given phenomena, unlike Greek astronomers who searched celestial locations for a given time. Like his Chaldean predecessors, Mr. Chadbourne's methodology has a singular ability to personalize a chart that is rarely accomplished by others. In using his tools and techniques, I have found it's as he states, "the birth chart is so powerful it may be considered a cosmic DNA program..."

For serious astrologers, interested in moving into uncharted territory this is a must buy book full of ideas, mathmatics, tools,and rules for re-examining the chart. You will see yourself and your clients/friends/family differently. What a gift!

Rating:
Summary: More of a whisper than a book!!
Review: I found the writing style of this author incredibly sloppy, fuzzy, and patchy. He provides very few graphical examples, which are poorly presented and minimally explained. The text is disjointed and scattered--high on vague generalities and hype, and low on specifics and detail. Unless you are an experienced astrologers, you more than likely would have a hard time in getting much original practical information out of this work. I could have extracted some usable original information out of this work for all the time I spent reading and rereading it had the author focused on some core concept/technique and had provided more detailed and well reasoned graphical examples. In that case, this work would have been no more than 150 pages long and much more rewarding to read. The author is just guessing on how Chaldeans did their astrological work, and I am afraid most readers, in turn, would just have to guess on how to put this guess work to practical use. It was a rather frustrating experience to try to read and understand this work--and I do read a lot of books. I had thought that Indian writers of Hindu astrology are lacking in their writing skills, but this work clearly indicated that that deficiency is not endemic to Indian writers only. I hope that the author and the publisher would seriously revamp this work in their second edition to make it cohesive, accessible, and worthwhile to read.

Rating:
Summary: remarkable
Review: This book is written in a very educational way: every chapter can be read alone without reading the whole book, the layout is superb so that your mind can grasp it easily. Wonderful. It is remarkable how much new information this book contains, though some of the material did remind me of the books by Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson ('the moon last over', stacks in declination rather than in longitude, etc...). I like the style and approach of the author though I'm not sure if it all works the way it should. I'll have to try calculating the sunset charts in the sidereal zodiac and use the stacks (30 degree wheel) and other techniques for some time. I have not found a delineation for the moon mansions (nakshatras in vedic astrology) in the book and miss it because I'm not sure if the same interpretations of the vedic or arabic mansions can be used. Some chapters are rather brief but the most important information is there. This book is recommended reading because of the fact that it opens our eyes for ancient techniques that may possibly be worth incorporating in our astrological work. I'm not sure if it can convince tropical astrologers to switch to the sidereal system. I think that both systems have their validity and that we should use them both as long as we respect the appropriate rules of the respective systems. Again it will be welcomed if some astrological software can incorporate these techniques so that delineating gets simpler and less timeconsuming.