The USA Edition of my "The Fundaments Of Medical Astrology"

Dear Friends,

I am very happy to announce you the USA second edition of my book: “The Fundaments of Medical Astrology”, translated in an excellent kind by Luciano Drusetta and Ram Ramakrishna and graphically composed in a very nice release by Pino Valente.

It was changed and enriched in relation to the Italian and Slovenian editions.

One page with the most important rules on the times of a surgery was added.

I’d like to read some reviews from some USA and Canada doctors and scientists that read our blog, with a particular reference to the preface that is very based on a substantial epistemology written.

Best regards to all!

From the jacket:

A new book by an author that points to the practical use of astrological knowledge, while not disregarding the theoretical matrix from which it derives. A text to give testimony of a series of lesser and major discoveries gleaned from a whole life of studies, such as the correspondence between eyes & sight with the signs of Virgo & Pisces and with the 12th and 6th Houses, or the correspondence between the impairment of hearing and the sign of Aquarius – just to mention two specific items never noticed by other astrologers. This volume doesn’t purport to be a treatise. It does not even claim to be comprehensive. The Author simply writes down the facts that he has been able to detect correctly within the framework of an immensely vast discipline.  
Nonetheless, this volume contains some theoretical-philosophical sections, such as the preface, containing interesting disquisitions towards epistemology, and the analysis of the ‘incredible’ paradox of the bumblebee – it should not be able to fly, but since it doesn’t know that it couldn’t, it does fly. 
This volume also contains short sections on neurosis and mental disorders. Other sections explain how anybody can make good use of Active Astrology (and particularly, of the so called ‘aimed birthdays’) together with the medical therapies suggested by the specialists in order to improve their own state of wellness.

PREFACE

On the doctors’ medical symbol (the caduceus) you can read: Medical Art – not Medical Science. Personally, I believe that this does not debase medicine – in fact, it dignifies it. Let us consider the case of a ‘measuring’ doctor. Once I had an ophthalmologist check me. In many ways you could define him as a ‘scientific’ doctor – one thousand per mil. My problem was a sort of dryness on my eyes. He examined me with precision instruments, clocking certain times, consulting tables and – eventually – he declared that my value of dry eyes was... thus implying that I was fine. Later on, I had another doctor check my eyes. She was an ophthalmologist too, but a less ‘scientific’ one. I did not mention my problem to her. She too examined my eyes with instruments, but above all she asked me a sequel of questions about my life, my job, and my food habits. She almost seemed to be willing to analyse my whole persona, but she eventually concluded that my problem was dry eyes, and that it would be a good thing putting drops on it, as well as following certain therapeutic and prophylactic protocols specifically suited for this lesser pathology.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Now you tell me – in your opinion, should a medical doctor be a scientist who perfectly knows how to use his instrumentation and knowing perfectly about everything that has ever been tested and discovered in a laboratory? Or don’t you rather think that for your health it would be better if a medical doctor behaves more like the Italian physician Antonio Cardarelli, who used to observe carefully, to interrogate cautiously, to speak very little, and eventually to formulate his diagnoses, which usually proved to be exact? In other words: would you trust better a doctor with portable computerized equipment, or a doctor with good knowledge of psychology, sociology, literature? A doctor whose interest is to keep himself updated in the fields of agricultural policy, pollution, animal abuse? Who likes reading about the ancient research on water memory, about the discoveries that help validate astrology, and so on? The bottom line is – as a good friend of mine, an important professor of medicine at a university, a man with a fantastic classical culture and thousands of interests in virtually every field, claims – in the overwhelming majority of cases the so called scientist of our days is nothing more than a technician. So, if you stick to the etymology of the word, the paradox could be exactly the following: nowadays, a technician with a great passion for knowledge could embody better than a scientist the spirit of Plato’s motto: The unexamined life is not worth living. This quote from Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism1 explains the same notion. “[…] the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.”

Thus we have reached the point where I wanted to lead my readers – to the question of the ‘radio repairer’. I would like to delve into it a little, then come back to medicine and eventually, explain what spurred me to write this book on medical astrology, which you hopefully are just beginning to consult or study. You may know that I have stated several times that when dealing with astrology, I try to act as a radio repairer, who knows that if he replaces a valve, the radio will play again even if the owner of the radio set is a physicist who claims that this is not possible. Now I believe that the most interesting example to delve into this notion is that of the flying bumblebee2 that should not be able to fly. Let us put it in other words. In a nutshell, more or less the question is as follows. From the books on flight mechanics, every student of aeronautical engineering has learnt that bumblebees can not fly. In fact, their squat shape, their specific weight – excessive compared to the extension of their wings – and their overall physical structure are opposed to the possibility that they could ever take off and fly. But the bumblebee doesn’t know it, hence it flies.

Wonderful, isn’t it?

So, let us consider whether anybody has ever been able to expose these notions at a higher level of knowledge and culture in a broad sense. In my opinion, within the frame of the subject we are developing in these pages, science historian Alexandre Koyré’s From the World of Approximation to the Universe of Precision is extremely interesting. (2) I present to you some passages with the clarification that in his book Koyré, who’s a giant of the philosophy of science, specifically deals with science and technology. Among other things, he wonders how come the science of ancient Greeks could remain – so to say – hibernated for several centuries before finding practical application that may be useful to man. Let me quote the passages more relevant to the notion of the ‘radio repairer’. “… In an essay published in this very place, I have claimed that one can not find satisfactory solution to the problem of machinism considered under its double aspect: a) Why was machinism born in the 17th century? Why wasn’t it born twenty centuries earlier, particularly in Greece? …” (3)

“… This is a paradoxical enterprise. For reality – the reality of daily life in which we live and stay – is not mathematics. Nor is it possible to mathematize it. For it is the domain of the moving, of the imprecise, of the ‘more or less’, of the ‘roughly’. …” (4)

“… That the technical thought of common sense does not depend on scientific thought, even if the former can absorb from the latter the elements that can be embedded in common sense. That it can develop, invent, adapt ancient discoveries to the new needs, as well as making new discoveries. That guided and stimulated by experience and action, by victories and blows, it can transform the rules of techne and can also create and develop both tools and machines. That with often rudimental means – thanks to the ability of those who use them – it can create works whose perfection (not to mention their beauty) highly exceed the products of scientific technology (particularly at its earlier stage) – the history of Middle Age gives us striking evidence of all this. …” (5)

“… Nonetheless, it is possible to wonder whether this apparent double deficiency could be explained exactly through the typical mentality and the general structure of the ‘world of the more-or-less’. Now, as regards to this, it seems to me that the case of alchemy gives us the definite answer. In fact, during its millenary existence, unique among the science of the earthly things, alchemy could build its own vocabulary, notation and even equipment that our chemistry has received and preserved in inheritance. Alchemy gathered treasures of observation; performed thousands of experiments; it also made important discoveries. Yet it has never been able to make a specific experience – this is because it has never even tried to. The descriptions of alchemical operation have nothing in common with the formulas of our laboratories: they are cooking recipes – as imprecise, approximate, and qualitative as recipes. It is not the material impossibility of performing measurements that constrains the alchemist – he simply does not make use of them even though he has them at hand. It is not the thermometer that he lacks: it’s the notion that heat could undergo an exact measurement. Thus he is content with the terms of common sense (high flame, low flame, etc.) and he virtually never uses scales. Yet scales exist. And the scales of the goldsmith and jeweller are fairly precise. But this is exactly the reason why the alchemist does not use it. For if he used it he would be a chemist. Better said, had he in mind the notion of using scales, he would already be a chemist. …” (6)

“… But to tell the truth, Galileo didn’t know much more than Vitellone. Yet it was enough to allow him to concretize his idea after contemplating it. Also, there is nothing simpler than a telescope, or at least a spy glass. To build them there’s no need of any science or special lenses, therefore, not any specialized technique. Two spectacle lenses put one after another – this is what a spy glass is. [A note from the Author: roughly speaking, this is what a ‘radio repairer’ does when replacing a valve in the radio receiver.] As surprising and unlikely as it may be, for four centuries, it did not occur for anybody to see what would happen if they had used two pairs of spectacles at the same time, instead of simply one. It is a matter of fact that lens makers were no opticians: they were only craftsmen. They did not make an optical instrument: they made a tool. So, they built it according to the traditional rules of their art, without looking for anything else. There is a deep truth in the (perhaps legendary) tradition claiming that the invention of the first spy glass is due to chance, to a little son of a Dutch lens maker who was simply playing with lenses. …” (7)

“… Nothing will reveal this fundamental difference better than Galileo building his telescope. While Lippertshey and the Janssens, having discovered by mere chance that a specific combination of lenses builds up a spy glass, restricted themselves to making the unavoidable and somehow inevitable adjustments to their ‘reinforced spectacles’ (a tube, a mobile eyepiece), when Galileo gets the news of the ‘approaching spectacles’ from the Dutch, he comprehends their theory. Based on this theory – surely insufficient, still a theory – Galileo carries each time farther the precision and the power of his lenses, thus building his series of perspicilli that gape at the immensity of the sky before his eyes. The Dutch glasses had never done anything like this before, exactly because they hadn’t the same idea of the instrument that guided and inspired Galileo. So, the aimed (and attained) goal was completely different between them and Galileo. The Dutch lens is a practical device: it allows you see a far away object at a shorter distance, overcoming the limitations of the naked eye. It does not go farther, and it does not even want to go farther. It is not by chance if neither its inventors not its users ever used it to watch the sky… [On the contrary, the ‘radio repairer’ replaces the valve to have the radio receiver work; but after this initial stage of passive literacy of his own ‘science’ through practical experience, he progresses in his knowledge and creates a path of theoretical-practical experiences that allow him to achieve (the necessary changes having been made) to ‘Galileo’s telescope’.].” (8)

This leads us to a crucial point that forces us to a newer flash-back of some thousands of years. As the historians of astrology teach us (9), the first ‘written’ testimonials of this discipline date back to about 2,800 years before Christ in Mesopotamia. There and then, the astrologers/astronomers priests advised their monarch to promulgate laws in order to compel his subjects to try to conceive in the month of July, so that many individuals be born in the sign Aries because they were – rightly – considered to be the best fighters (in those times war was a very serious matter, requiring people to deal with it full time). This was based on the observation of the astrologers considering the features of those born in Aries. They did not ask for the approval of statistics or science: they simply noticed a matter of fact. It worked.

Let us consider medicine once again. Often but not always, medicine makes use of statistics. Sometimes the testing of certain drugs whose aim is healing serious diseases is carried over few dozens of patients. If the doctors establish that the active principle works without evidently harming side effects for the patient (not even after a span of time), the drug is approved. Without the seal of science? No, without external seals. This line of reasoning (eventually, you would say…) leads to me and this book.. Medical astrology has never been at the top of my thoughts, neither as an astrologer nor as a person. I was and am convinced that in this field the best author should essentially be a medical doctor. Nevertheless, I could not avoid thinking that I had almost thirty-six years of experience, studies and researches. Thus I have been collecting an impressive (to me) amount of objective knowledge and data – a real fortune that would run the risk of being lost, hadn’t I resolved to write it all down on paper. Of course, I am aware that my knowledge in this field is only a tiny segment of an infinite line.

Nonetheless – as you can directly notice by studying the life of your beloved ones, of yourselves and of your acquaintances in the light of the lesser and major fragments of truth that I am going to expose – many things can be affirmed much beyond a simple theoretical hypothesis. Perhaps, statistics one day will validate certain items of my medical astrology. For example, my statistical work carried over thousands of seriously ill hepatic patients, which you can read at the end of this volume, has been limited by the lack of the exact time of birth in the studied sample. This may have spoiled, statistically speaking, the positive result that I yet achieved. Had I known also the time of birth of each patient, not only would I have searched for Jupiter in Sagittarius: I would have also considered the significantly strong elements in Sagittarius / 9th House, or a ruling and blemished Jupiter, or the cusp of the 6th House in Sagittarius, and so on.

But for the time being I think I am already able to claim certain bits of truth with enough tranquillity and intellectual honesty. Dozens of cases examined and studied with the craving of a researcher and with the support of my extraordinarily good memory (10) have thrown at me pieces of evidence in such a clear way that only a blind person or someone in bad faith could not have been able to notice them in practice. Take, for example, the case of blindness and deafness. You will get convinced – not much with my examples, rather with your own examples – that the astral combinations that I have detected are, virtually in the totality of cases, those which actually indicate these pathologies. The converse, however is not true. That is, in every chart in which such a combination exists, the disease does not manifest itself in the individual that it represents. This is why I agree with a good friend and colleague of mine, whom I value very much, who wrote about the difficulties facing the multifactoriality of a system of analysis.

But such multifactoriality does not allow us to freeze and hibernate in thought and actions. We shall state that a certain illness or disease can be certainly detected clearly in the native’s birth chart, even if there is one case over one thousand that does not match that particular tenet, and even if we’ll never be able to ‘see’ a multitude of other pathologies in someone’s birth sky – not to mention that many medical doctors also aren’t able to see them… I would also add that the book you are reading is no substitute for your doctor at any stage of the possible pathological life of a human being. It is intended particularly for researchers, to my good colleague astrologers, and to beginners who are thirsty for knowledge. Of course, nothing would prevent you from putting into practice the teachings of this book. For example, should you notice a danger for the sight of a newly born baby, you could advise its parents to have it checked often by an ophthalmologist, while you should never suggest drugs or therapies. I would like to add that this volume has been greatly inspired by the wonderful essay of André Barbault that you can read in the Postface of this book, which by no chance takes the very same title as his essay.

In my opinion, his essay is an essence of truth and includes very clever statements that I had never had the chance to read anywhere else. I think it is equally imperative for me to add that this text does not pretend to be exhaustive in the field. It deliberately limits itself to the only pathologies of which I have had a significant and direct experience. This means that I provide a ‘maimed’ list of items, yet a list that ‘everybody can verify’, a list of items concerning specific pathologies. I prefer so rather than to expound a purely theoretical exercise wishing to attain an alleged completeness, yet a work that would reveal to be totally unfulfilling and unable to describe the practical reality of our existence.

I would have liked to add many more things; but this would open too long threads that may probably be worth individual and separate future elaboration. Before concluding, I feel bound to give my warm thanks to my friend Lorenzo Vancheri. With affection, yet without any trace of indulgence for any sort of typo, he helps improving the quality of my works with highly precious suggestions and remarks. Let me also express my gratitude to my friend Pino Valente. He is an important international artist as well as an excellent computer expert. He has helped me ‘tailoring’ this book, particularly enriching it with the drawings he has personally cast using my software programs Astral and Aladino. The birth data are almost exclusively taken from my personal database or from Grazia Bordoni’s data collection.

Ciro Discepolo

Naples, the 14th of March 2005

Remarks:

(1) “In the opinion of most specialists of aerodynamics, considering its weight, its shape, and the physical features of the air, the flight of the bumblebee is impossible. Yet bumblebees fly.”

Although science and its technological employments are repeatedly promoted by media, attracting the interest of the public (especially for their use in the medical and the biological field) only in the last decades has this sector suffered from such serious problems of image like never before. Forgetting that in this field we are also talking of human activities – thus subject to the moral and social rules that a community decides to apply through the individual and collective compromise – many of those who feel ill–at–ease with science prefer to take refuge in the ideological contrast or to escape to a non-existent past in which they suppose everything stood in harmony with nature. At a practical level they pose again the old, nineteenth-century ‘romantic’ reaction according to which nature is something good a priori: its imitation was not only an act of sacrilege – it was also a serious mistake of presumption. This attitude sometimes shows through every day conversations. How many times have you been asked the following? “If science is really what it pretends to make us believe it is, why isn’t it able to explain that such a small-sided winged, weighty insect like the bumblebee is capable of flying in spite of everything?” No scientist with a minimal practical experience would ever dream to preach the omnipotence of his discipline or to call into question the cleverness of the results of a long-lasting biological evolution of the organisms. Obviously, one of the reasons they don’t do so is because challenge is mainly considered as an element of moral reflection. Personally, I believe that allegations of this type are fundamentally wrong. As I have stated before, reflection should not address to science ‘itself’ but to those who practise science instead – analyzing their degree of freedom, the degree of conditioning they receive, and the chances they stand of being able to react and to make their voice heard. As for the bumblebee, there is only this specific question left: are you really sure that scientists are not able to explain why this insect is capable of flying?

A legend was born

According to aeronautical engineer John McMasters, the bumblebee paradox began to spread in the Germany of the Thirties of the last century, precisely at Göttingen University. It is precisely there where Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953) laid the foundations of fluid dynamics. According to McMasters, the first who exposed this enigma was a Swiss professor, deceased long time ago, a pioneer researcher of the dynamics of gases at supersonic speed in the Thirties and Forties. According to legend, at a dinner, the gas dynamicist had a conversation with a colleague biologist, who made the notorious question, “What aerodynamic properties have the bumblebee wings to let it fly?” The Swiss scientist did some quick calculations supposing that its wings were smooth, without wrinkles.

His conclusion was astonishing – based on his calculations, bumblebees shouldn’t have been able to sustain themselves floating in the air! Clearly, something was wrong. Soon, the dynamicist realized that the mistake was in his starting assumption. In fact, he examined the bumblebee wings with a microscope and they revealed not to be smooth at all. But it was too late to stop the spreading myth of the impossibility of the flight of the bumblebee: also with the help of journalists and scientific publishers, the supposed paradox had started to spread like a rumour. In 1957, J. Pringle, who was the author of a well-known essay on the mechanics of the flight of insects, succeeded in reconstructing the most significant stages of the birth of this legend. Rather than reconstructing the dialogues, it is worth noticing the reasons that initially led scientist to consider the impossibility of the bumblebee flight, and subsequently to analyze the physical tricks that make the insect effectively able to sustain itself in the air.

Why bumblebees fly

The Swiss dynamicist’s considerations were based on the presumption that if the bumblebee wings have a smooth surface, they must have a very low ‘Reynolds number’. This parameter is named after a fluid dynamicist of the 19th century. It gives a measure of the evaluation of the ratio of inertial forces to the viscosity of a fluid – in other words, the product of the mass of a body moving through the fluid by the acceleration received by the body itself.

A dust particle floating in the air has very low Reynolds numbers (typically 1 to 10), while jet airliners usually exceed the value of ten millions. With a value between 100 and 10,000, the wings of insects are positioned in the lower range of a graph showing speed compared to the Reynolds numbers. One way to figure out this situation is to imagine that insects must fly with their little wings through a fluid that they find to be much viscous – say, as pasty as golden syrup. Assuming that the bumblebee wings have a low Reynolds number and a smooth surface, the Swiss dynamicist supposed that the air flow on them was of a laminar type, i.e. without turbulences. This implied the lack of adherence between the air and the wing surface, and consequently the loss of lift – the force that sustains flying airliners preventing their ‘stall’, i.e. their vertical fall. Intuitively, the aerodynamics of the bumblebee is not the best possible. Birds’ wingspan allow them to glide for long distances, while the wings of this insect are so ridiculously small that if you catch a dead bumblebee and let it fall, you see it precipitate to the soil like a stone under its own weight. So, how could the mystery of its flight be solved? The answer is that the bumblebee has found a way to sustain itself in the air by exploiting the turbulence created by the furious flapping of its little wings. In 1975, in the magazine Nature, Christopher Rees exposed certain observations on the shape and the function of corrugation of the wings of insects.

He had noticed that the sequel of strongly irregular sections on their wings implied huge aerodynamic advantages without jeopardizing aerodynamics itself. In fact, Rees explained that if you draw the chart of the lift and the aerodynamic resistance of those wings, they are seen to possess features similar to those of the conventional wing profile of an airplane. Nonetheless, the most recent explanations on the flight of insects have followed a different path than classical aerodynamics: they have taken into consideration the tricks that allow them to fly in conditions of instability. Returning to the bumblebee, there was a need of explaining how it could succeed in exploiting the aerodynamic turbulence around its body in order to maintain itself to float. It is now clear that the aerodynamics of insects is different from the aerodynamics that the aeronautical technicians had studied until then, always considering static wings and uniform airflow.

Using high-speed film recordings of insects flapping their wings and comparing them with computer-simulated models, around 1990 it was discovered that insects create air vortexes around a central nucleus. This way the lift (i.e. the force that keeps them flying) is not generated on a continuous basis, like it happens with the wings of airplanes – it is generated in intervals. Insects use their wings in a way that is more similar to those of helicopters than to airplanes, thus being able to fly not only horizontally but also vertically, diagonally, not to mention their ability to keep still in mid-air. Unlike helicopters, which have a central axis of rotation, these creatures flap their wings downward, they rotate them upwards, they flap them upwards, then they rotate them once again and so on. These movements do not necessarily take place vertically, i.e. perpendicularly to the ground: they may take place slantwise, thus allowing them greater manoeuvrability. Thanks to the vortexes created by these manoeuvres the air flows more quickly on the upper surface and more slowly on the lower surface of the wing. This generates a difference of pressure that gives the necessary lift to keep flying. There is a danger in ambush though: stall, that is the sudden loss of lift depending on the angle formed by the wing and the flow of air arriving on its surface.

When a wing with a large angle of attack is strongly accelerated, a new temporary air vortex is generated that adds lift and delays stall. It was commonly believed that this phenomenon was too ephemeral in insects to be able to contribute significantly to their flight capability, until Charles Ellington and his team of collaborators of the department of zoology of Cambridge University proved the contrary in 1996. They studied Manduca sexta, a moth that had already been useful to science in studies of endocrinology and neurology. Ellington and his team used a 3D photo camera to take pictures of the movements of the moth wings, and then analyzed them on the computer. They compared all the results with the behaviour of a robot called ‘the flipper’, which mechanically imitated the movements and the deformations of the moth wings, but with a lower frequency of flaps to counterbalance the fact that the robot was ten times bigger than the Manduca. The researchers discovered that in these situations, a vortex was generated on the edge of the wings that remained attached to the wings, coiling along their surface and creating an area of low pressure. That explained why the insects are able to generate a lift three times higher than the lift deduced by the calculations of conventional aerodynamics, and why the stall that one would expect under those conditions does not take place. Pictures were taken of ‘the flipper’ in a wind gallery, showing the turbulences generated along its wings, thus giving clear evidence of the phenomenon in process. Following this pioneering work, different laboratories elaborated different mechanical models for a more accurate comprehension of insect flight.

Nonetheless, studies are to be extended over the following years before we can hope to see a robot-insect fly in a fully autonomous way. The formation of the ‘spiral vortex’ can explain fairly well the flight of the bigger insects with a relatively wide wingspan. With smaller insects though, the viscosity forces tend to dissipate the vortex quite quickly: hence the necessity of elaborating a further mechanism that allow them to fly. Once again the solution came out from a robot-insect simulating the flight of Drosophila, another insect commonly studied in genetics and biology. In 1999 in the journal Science, an article appeared by Michael Dickinson, an expert in physiology and mechanics of flight, and a group of collaborators. They had sunken a 24-cm mechanical model of Drosophila into mineral oil to simulate the viscosity that the real insect feels during flight. A series of motors connected with its wings allowed the simulation of real movements, including the rotation of the wings at the end of every single flap. A series of pressure gauges connected to the wings allowed them to measure stronger forces than those expected under non-dynamical conditions.

What had been detected was that the movement of the insect wings ‘captured’ the vortex generated during the previous flap. Another crucial factor highlighted by the researchers was the high sensitivity to small changes in the synchronization of the rotation of the wings, which allows the insect to change significantly both the intensity and the direction of the forces acting on them. This is another factor that must be taken in due consideration in the ‘instable dynamics’ of the world of insects. Can the most recent theories and models proposed on the flight of insects explain the paradox of the bumblebee flight? Experts are inclined to think that each kind of insect has developed its own peculiar manner of exploiting instable dynamics. Direct observation of real flight and its comparison with computer simulations and mechanical models have revealed the secrets of certain insects like Drosophila and Manduca. There is no reason to believe that this might not happen also with the bumblebee. Meanwhile, in the last years there has been a constant progress in the comprehension of insect aerodynamics, to such an extent that specialists believe that the creation of the first robotized insects is at hand. We are talking of the so-called MAV (micro air vehicles).

They will be provided with tiny radio transmitters and other sensors so they will be able to fly in narrow spaces that man could hardly reach. For example, they would control the performance and the level of security of the complex network of pipes designed for carrying gases and chemicals in large industrial plants. Currently, at least three nations are developing their own MAV and, of course, there is an interest in their possible use in military and espionage. If they are carried out, it is not the fault of the poor bumblebee and those who have studied its impossible flight are innocent.

[In conclusion, the Author dares to say that, for the time being, he is still allowed to claim that the bumblebee can not fly: but since it does not know, it keeps on flying].

Bibliographical references (concerning the bumblebee)

1) John McMasters, “The flight of the bumblebee and related myths of entomological engineering”, American Scientist, vol. 77, 1989, pp. 164-169.

2) Robin Wootton, “How flies fly”, Nature, vol. 400, 8th July 1999, pp. 112-113.

3) Charles P. Ellington et all, “Leading-edge vortices in insect flight”, Nature, vol. 384, 19/26 December 1996, pp. 626-630.

4) Gary Taubes, “Biologists and engineers create a new generation of robots that imitate life”, Science, vol. 288, 7 April 2000, pp. 80-83.

5) Robert Dudley, “Unsteady aerodynamics”, Science, vol. 284, 18 June 1999, pp. 1937-1939.

6) Dickinson M. H., F. O. Lehmann, et al., “Wing rotation and the aerodynamic basis of insect flight”, Science, vol. 284, 18 June 1999, pp. 1954-1960.

7) Robin Wootton, “From insects to microvehicles”, Nature, vol. 403, 13 January 2000, pp. 144-145.

Andrea Albini

Technical Officer

Department of Electrical Engineering

Pavia University

(2) Alexandre Koyré, From the World of Approximation to the Universe of Precision. Italian edition: Dal mondo del pressappoco all’universo della precisione, Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Torino, 2000, 136 pagine.

(3) Ibidem, page 89

(4) Ibidem, page 90

(5) Ibidem, page 92

(6) Ibidem, page 98

(7) Ibidem, page 100

(8) Ibidem, page 101

(9) I refer to historians like Franz Boll, Carl Bezold, Wilhelm Gundel, Eugenio Garin, and Will-Erich Peuckert. I would never refer to the makeshift historians of astrology who swell the ranks of our detractors.

(10) There is a short period of my life in which I was forced to take extremely strong and rather harmful medicines trying to sedate an insistent cephalgia that I would completely abandon later on. In that short span of time I used to have real lapses of memory (limited to recent memories though) caused precisely by those drugs – which would be soon subject to an inquiry that led to their withdrawal from the market. With the exception of that period, luckily I have always been able to rely on my extraordinarily good memory. Among other things, being fond of cinema, I am able to remember every single scene of movies that I have watched only once twenty years ago.

Translator’s Notes

1 Translator’s Notes Cristina Zaltieri in Felicità e bene comune. Etica e politica nel tardo Novecento credits this passage to Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, Pfüllingen, Neske, 1959.

Following several important Italian authors, Ciro Discepolo also credits this passage to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism.

Nevertheless, browsing the English versions of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism I haven’t found any sentence that may match the one quoted by Ciro Discepolo. My translation proposes to the readers the only one English sentence that – to my knowledge – matches fairly well with the passage originally quoted by Ciro Discepolo. It can be found in Martin Heidegger, “Memorial Address” in Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson & E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row, 1966: 44-46.

2 Translator’s Note. In Italy the paradox is better known as ‘la storia del volo del calabrone, che non può volare ma vola ugualmente’: ‘the story of the hornet that flies despite not being able to fly’, where calabrone stands for hornet (Vespa crabro).

Preface .....................................................   .................................... pag..007

01.     Signs and planets ............................................................         pag..018

02.     Why two charts can be equal ..........................................          pag..049

03.     The incredible ‘mystery’ of the Zodiac Man .....................         pag..053

04.     Medical astrology referred to ‘World Astrology’ ..............         pag..057

05.     Blindness and other serious eye problems ......................           pag..071

06.     Bones, teeth and knees ..................................................           pag..079

07.     Cephalgia .......................................................................          pag..085

08.     Colitis .............................................................................         pag..092

09.     Deafness or serious hearing problems .......................................  pag..100 

10.     Heart .......................................................................................  pag..106

11.     Liver disease ....................................................................          pag..115

12.     Prostate ...........................................................................          pag..124

13.     Serious neurosis ............................................................ ...         pag..128

14.     Surgery in general, but with particular reference to fractures

         and various injuries caused by accidents of any kind .........           pag..145

15.     Throat ...................................................................................... pag..154

16.     Short miscellaneous ...........................................................        pag..157

Relationships between medicine and Solar Returns

17.     Relationships between medicine and Solar Returns ..................... pag..165

18.     Example of application of an Aimed Solar Return to improve

         one’s health ........................................................................        pag..172

19.     SRs and medicine: second exercise .................................. .         pag..181

20.     SRs and medicine: third exercise ........................................         pag..184

Appendice

21.     The fundaments of Medical Astrology ...............................         pag..187

22.     Research covering 13,498 cases of liver disease ...............           pag..200

23.     An astrological research on schizophrenia .........................          pag..214

24.     Active Astrology and Surgery ............................................         pag..225

25.     An essential bibliography ................................................. ...       pag..226

Buona Giornata a Tutti.

Ciro Discepolo

www.cirodiscepolo.it 

www.solarreturns.com 

www.lunarreturns.com 

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