The Recursive Astrology

The astrology counterpart of The Recursive Tarot — the same creed and method, a different domain. A static, backend-free site that turns a folder of JSON into a browsable library of the historiographical views of astrology: the eras and stances through which humans have read meaning into the sky, each presented faithfully in its own terms and held honestly to the record.

Where the tarot library asks you to relate to the card, never obey it, this one asks you to read the sky to know yourself, not to be told your fate — a chart is a mirror and a calendar, never a command. And the subject here is not how to cast a chart but the history of the practice: the five-thousand-year record of humans reading meaning into the sky.

This repo is itself a Rung 6/7 move. In the parent project's contribution ladder, Rung 6 teaches you to make your own grammars and Rung 7 to make your own site to show them. This whole commons was founded from the tarot one — the method taken home and pointed at a new subject. The founding seed shipped in the parent's PR #36; the roadmap it travels with is PLAN.md.

Work in progress

This is a work in progress. I published it mainly so the pages could be served, and it isn't finished. Contributors are welcome: open an issue or send a pull request, however small.

The idea behind recursive.eco is a hypothesis, not a claim: that we may need to learn together how to create the conditions for recursive eco-improvement, rather than race toward recursive self-improvement.

If your work appears here and you'd like it featured differently, removed, or given a shelf of your own, please write to [email protected].

What's here

recursive-astrology/
├── index.html                                       reads any grammar (?grammar=<slug>) as cards
├── wheel.html                                       the twelve-house casting as an SVG wheel
├── theme.css                                        the single source of colour (light only)
├── voices.json                                      the creed — shared_intention + 3 voices
├── grammars/
│   ├── historiographies-of-astrology/               the record: 10 views + 3 pattern groupings
│   ├── tetrabiblos-ashmand/                         Ptolemy in his own (PD) words — 28 items
│   ├── alan-leo/                                    the Theosophical revival, PD — 38 items
│   ├── proctor-skeptical-astrology/                 the Victorian skeptic, PD — 37 items
│   ├── western-astrology-canonical/                 the flagship interpretation set — 43 items
│   ├── casting-big-three/                           casting: Sun · Moon · Ascendant (derived, never random)
│   ├── casting-twelve-houses/                       casting: the chart wheel (12 house positions)
│   └── casting-single-aspect/                       casting: any ONE aspect of your chart
├── research/                                        the evidence wing (dossiers are the source of truth)
│   ├── SCHEMA.md                                    how a dossier is written
│   ├── bibliography.bib                             every citable source, one place
│   └── views/<slug>.md                              one dossier per view, claims cited [@key]
├── recursive-eco.json                               the channel manifest (slug: astrology)
├── ids.json                                         slug → recursive.eco UUID map
├── docs/
│   ├── RECURSIVE-ECO-INTEGRATION.md                 the app↔repo contract (ownership, sync, castings)
│   └── APP-INTEGRATION-TODO.md                      hand-off notes for the recursive.eco side
├── check.py                                         the pre-commit gate, zero dependencies
├── PLAN.md                                          the founding plan & phased roadmap
├── CLAUDE.md                                        the rules of this commons (the creed is the spine)
├── CLAUDE-AI-INSTRUCTIONS.md                        the standing brief for app-connected sessions
├── ICONS.md                                         SVG glyph set — never emoji
├── GRAMMAR_FORMAT.md                                mirrored grammar-JSON reference (canonical: recursive.eco-schemas)
└── README.md                                        this file

Castings are never random. Where tarot draws from a shuffled deck, astrology's "deck" is your own chart: every casting position derives from an aspect of a given chart (your Sun, your houses, one aspect you choose). See wheel.html and grammars/casting-*/.

Everything is plain HTML, one CSS file, and JSON. No build step, no framework, no server in production. GitHub Pages serves it as-is.

No images, on purpose (for now). Every item is imageless. Honest sourcing of public-domain star charts and plates is a later, separate phase (PLAN.md §4 — Urania's Mirror first) — an honest gap beats a wrong picture. See CLAUDE.md for the full sourcing guardrails (never invent a citation, hedge contested claims, flag paraphrase as paraphrase).

The first hour

1. See it work (2 min). Browsers block file:// fetches, so open it over a tiny local server:

python -m http.server 8091
# now visit http://localhost:8091/

You'll see the library — the major historiographical views (Mesopotamian omen-craft, the Hellenistic synthesis, Jyotiṣa, the Islamic golden age, and on through the modern test tradition and the contemporary resurgence) plus a few patterns that group them — rendered as cards you can open.

2. Read the grammar (15 min). Open grammars/historiographies-of-astrology/grammar.json. Each item is one view: an id, a name, and sections — What this view holds (faithful, in the tradition's own terms), sometimes In its own words (a verifiable line or a flagged paraphrase), The record (the honest, hedged history), and Reading (2–3 standard scholarly works as pointers, no page numbers). The last three items are patterns — they hold no view of their own; they have parts: [ids] and make a historiographical shape visible across several views.

3. Read a dossier (10 min). Each view has an evidence file under research/views/. The dossier is the source of truth; the grammar is the display. Claims are cited [@key] into research/bibliography.bib and confidence-flagged. research/SCHEMA.md explains the format.

4. Add or improve a view (20 min). Copy an existing item, give it a new id, and fill the sections for a tradition or era you know. Keep the creed: read the record, don't predict; hedge what's contested (metadata.confidence: "low"); name only sources you're sure of. Reload the page.

5. Check it (1 min).

python check.py
# → OK: all checks passed (1 grammar)

check.py catches the handful of mistakes that stop a grammar from loading. Keep it green — it must pass before every commit.

The three voices

voices.json mirrors the tarot's shared_intention structure exactly (same keys, so tooling ports), then seeds three orientations you can read a sky through — each a genuine stance, presented faithfully:

• Ptolemy — natural-philosophy astrology: celestial influence as the physics of its age, and explicitly hedged (as Ptolemy himself hedged the Tetrabiblos) as a fallible, conjectural art.
• Jung — the archetypal mirror: the chart as a map of the psyche, meaningful by synchronicity (correspondence, not cause). An inspired-by framing, not the man's endorsement.
• The Skeptical School — from Pico della Mirandola to the modern controlled test: the view that astrology's effects are supplied by the reader, not the sky — presented as its own tradition of critique, not as our verdict on the rest.

Any disagreement a voice has with the record lives in the long form (its course pointer / the grammar's The record), never in the short intention. Every voice obeys the one creed.

The two rules worth keeping

1. All colour lives in theme.css. One :root of tokens, linked everywhere, light only. Never redeclare a colour in a page, never add a dark-mode block. To recolour the whole site, edit that one file.
2. The data outlives the platform. The viewer is deliberately thin. If this site vanished tomorrow, grammars/*.json and research/ would still be a clean, portable, public record of the subject. That's the point.

Where this connects

• The parent project: The Recursive Tarot — this repo's sibling, same creed, and the source of the grammar format and the theme.
• The schemas commons: recursive.eco-schemas — where the three imported voice libraries come from (Ashmand's Ptolemy, Alan Leo, Proctor), plus canonical astrology-type grammars (western, jyotish, archetypal) available for later adoption. Consolidate, don't multiply: check there before inventing a shape.
• The sibling sky projects: nara (the tropical zodiac reframed honestly as the human-subjective sky — and home of the 0→1 founding course this repo is itself an instance of) and its objective-sky twin kali-paradevi.
• The ladder you're on: Ways to Contribute — Rungs 1–5 tend an existing commons; Rung 6 makes your own grammars; Rung 7 makes your own site.
• Go further — the live app: grammars here can also open in recursive.eco for a live oracle, AI readings, and community editing. The parent's docs/RECURSIVE-ECO-INTEGRATION.md shows how a repo wires to a channel.

Take the method home. Found your own.

Licensing — software vs. content

This repo is dual-licensed, deliberately:

What	License
Code — viewer/, viewers/, api/, scripts/, tests/, course/*.js, any HTML/CSS/JS/Python, and the format spec GRAMMAR_FORMAT.md	Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE
Content — grammars/, research/, docs/, plan/, voices.json, the course text (course/*.mdx), and the prose in the Markdown files	CC-BY-SA-4.0 — see LICENSE-CONTENT.txt
The names "recursive.eco" and "Recursive", and the spiral logo	Not licensed — see TRADEMARKS.md

Apache-2.0 on the code because the calculation engine is the part worth passing on freely: it is built on Skyfield and JPL's DE421 rather than the Swiss Ephemeris, so it carries no copyleft obligation inherited from a dependency — a rare thing in open astrology software, and more useful to everyone unencumbered. (The code was MIT until September 2026; copies taken before then keep that licence.) CC-BY-SA on the content because a commons of readings should stay a commons: reuse it, adapt it, keep it open, and keep the attribution.

One third-party library is vendored into the code: AstroChart (AstroDraw/AstroChart 3.0.2, MIT, Copyright © 2015-2025 Arthur Fücher) draws the Western chart wheel, at viewer/assets/js/vendor/astrochart.js, with its licence beside it. It is vendored rather than installed because this is a static site with no build step. It draws only; every position, house cusp and aspect it renders comes from our own Skyfield/DE421 engine.

The graphic ephemeris on the Transits tab uses d3 (BSD-3-Clause), loaded from a CDN the first time that panel is opened rather than vendored, since it is the only view that needs it. Its form — time on one axis, the zodiac folded by a modulus on the other, natal positions as horizontal lines — follows standard graphic-ephemeris practice; katelouie/stellium's ephemeris.py was read as a specification for the details (the wrap-around break, the station markers) and none of its AGPL code is used here.

Third-party material referenced by the grammars carries its own status: the source texts (Ashmand's Ptolemy, Alan Leo, Proctor) and the illustrations are public domain, each recorded with its provenance in the item that uses it. Astronomical data comes from JPL's DE421 ephemeris. Human Design terminology describes a system originated by Ra Uru Hu; the calculations here are our own, and since August 2026 every gate, channel, centre and type description is our own writing (see the August 5 2026 CHANGELOG entry). Jovian Archive holds trademarks in Human Design names (among them Rave BodyGraph and Rave Mandala); this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by it. See NOTICE.

Author: PlayfulProcess. Built with Claude for recursive.eco.