Date: 25th August 2019
Time: 10:30 for 11am
Venue: Shamballah, near Cape Point (directions)
Fee: Members free, non-members R50, all welcome!
Scientistic criticism of astrology argues that that astrology has no value because it is not a science, while others argue that not being scientific gives it greater value.
Sceptics like to believe that the advance of science news and education steadily erodes interest and belief in astrology. Statistics do not support this: in America, scepticism about astrology reached its peak in 2004 and has been falling ever since. Can we link this trend – and the broader decline in the sceptics’ movement – to any mundane astrological factors? Such as Pluto entering Capricorn in 2008, or the earlier conjunction of Neptune and Uranus in that sign? Or could it be a side effect of some more profound change?
About Lionel Snell
Lionel is not a professional astrologer, though he has been interested in it since the 1960s. In the 1970s he worked with Ronald C Davison and attended Astrological Association meetings in London, and talks by Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas, John Addey and others. In the 1980s he worked with Charles Harvey. In 2005 he and his wife Lynn moved to SA and Simon’s Town.
He is a freelance technical PR and ghostwriter for IT and communications companies, and is pretty good at making complex ideas digestible. But he gets a lot more fun from writing about topics around magic, the occult and new paradigms. In the 1970s he was the first person to argue that our universe might be a virtual reality, and his most recent book proposes that magical thinking is more a post-scientific evolution than a regression. He is best known for his seminal contribution to the Chaos Magick current, for being among the few to have completed the Abramelin operation, and for a respected YouTube channel under the pen-name Ramsey Dukes. He has aged a bit since the photo he provided: reason enough not to update it.