The Antikythera Mechanism and Astrology

In episode 440 astrologers Chris Brennan and Sam Ogden discuss the Antikythera Mechanism, which is a complex mechanical device that was recovered from an ancient shipwreck, and how it may have been used for astrology.

The Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in the year 1901 by a group of sponge divers who found an ancient shipwreck near a Greek island named Antikythera.

They had found a Greek merchant ship that sank around the year 60 BCE, and divers were able to recover a number of ancient statues, pottery, as well as a corroded mechanical device with lots of gears.

Over the past century a series of researchers have slowly reconstructed the device, and recently advanced X-ray scans have allowed scholars to look inside to see how it worked.

We now know that it was a complex astronomical device that depicted the movements of the cosmos, and it was also a sort of mechanical calculator or computer that could compute positions of the planets in the past or future, predict when ecli…