Cosmobiology

KOZ-moh-by-OL-uh-jee

Definition

Cosmobiology is a twentieth-century school of Western astrology founded by Reinhold Ebertin (1901–1988) and set out in Kombination der Gestirneinflüsse (1940; English The Combination of Stellar Influences, AFA 1972). It pares practice down to a focused toolkit — the hard aspects, midpoints (also called half-sums), the 90° dial, transits, and solar arcs — and deliberately leaves out houses, soft aspects, and most traditional dignities. It presents itself as an empirically grounded psychological-and-medical astrology rather than a metaphysical one.

In Tradition

Cosmobiology defines itself as the part of astrology it judges to be empirically solid, and keeps only that: the conjunction-opposition-square family of hard aspects (with semi-square and sesquisquare added in), the midpoint as a sensitive point combining the natures of two planets, and the 90° dial as its standard tool. It drops houses because birth times are often unreliable, and drops the soft aspects because they are held to lack timing precision.

In Practice

A practitioner builds a 90° dial of the birth chart, finds every natal midpoint and hard-aspect contact, and reads each as a planet-pair combination using Ebertin's ready-made symbolism. To forecast, transits, secondary progressions, and solar arcs are plotted on the dial and timed against the natal midpoint clusters with tight orbs of 1° to 1.5°. Synastry — comparing two people's charts — follows the same midpoint logic, giving priority to cross-chart contacts on the Sun/Moon, Mercury/Venus, and other social-axis midpoints. The school has a long-running interest in medical astrology, mapping planetary pairs to bodily tendencies, in line with Ebertin's own clinical bent.

Historical Origin

Cosmobiology grew out of Alfred Witte's Hamburg School of Uranian astrology (early twentieth century) and was launched as a distinct school by Reinhold Ebertin and the Ebertin-Verlag at Aalen, Germany in the 1930s–1940s. It reached English through Brummund's 1972 AFA translation of the Kombination. The school is now international — with active practitioners in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan — and still publishes through the Ebertin-Verlag and AFA.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading