Project Hindsight

Definition

Project Hindsight is a translation and scholarly initiative founded in 1993 by Robert Hand, Robert Schmidt, and Robert Zoller to produce careful English translations of Greek, Latin, and Arabic source texts on astrology. Working mainly from Cumberland, Maryland, the project published a Track 1 series of Hellenistic translations and a Track 2 series of medieval ones, and is widely credited with setting off the late-20th-century revival of traditional astrology.

In Tradition

Astrologers in the modern Hellenistic revival regard Project Hindsight as the school whose translations finally made the foundational classical texts available directly in English. Across the Hellenistic and traditional-medieval communities, practitioners cite Schmidt's Valens, Hand's Hephaestio, and Zoller's Bonatti as primary sources. Brennan, Crane, Holden, Greenbaum, and Lightfoot all build their own scholarship on, or in conversation with, the Project Hindsight body of work.

In Practice

You can use Project Hindsight publications to tie a particular technique back to its original source. The time-lord material of Valens — methods that hand the chart over to a ruling planet for a stretch of life — is found in Schmidt's *Anthology* translations. Hephaestio of Thebes' summaries of the earlier author Dorotheus appear in Hand's translations. Bonatti's medieval-Latin transmission of Sahl, Masha'allah, and Abu Ma'shar comes through Zoller's and Hand's work. The project covers multiple volumes of Valens, Paulus Alexandrinus, Hephaestio, Antiochus, Porphyry, Dorotheus, Bonatti, and Masha'allah, and each translation usually comes with a long introductory essay placing the work in its tradition.

Historical Origin

Project Hindsight's public phase began in 1993 with the first Hellenistic Track translations and has continued in publication and lecture form into the 21st century. Its working translations underpin the lean-corpus extractions of Crane's *Astrological Roots*, Greenbaum's *The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology*, Holden's *A History of Horoscopic Astrology*, Bram's 1975 *Mathesis*, and the Hellenistic, Persian-Nativities, and Bonatti corpora used throughout the lean campaign. All Project Hindsight translations are copyrighted-modern.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading