The 20th century will be remembered in the history of human knowledge as the rebirth of astrology. After a barren winter that began in the 17th century with the expulsion of this wisdom from French universities and, decades later, during the 18th century, with the advent of the Enlightenment, astrology returned to the forefront of cultural and scientific news during the last century. The real beginning of this awakening was not, as the books of history would record, the works that arrived at the turn of the century, be they those of Fomalhaut or of H. Selva in France nor those of Alan Leo in England. Even the serious and supposedly scientific attempts of the Frenchman Paul Choisnard cannot be said to have marked said beginning. The resurrection of astrology would have begun in Europe during the 1920s, when a succession of researches and discoveries led to a glimpse of the truth underlying this discipline. As early as 1898, in fact, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius conducted a scientific study on the effect of the moon upon the weather and living beings in general. It was not until the 1920s, however, that A. L. Chizhevsky and Drs. Faure and Sardou began to study sunspots and their existing relationship to life on Earth. Decades later, other researchers shall establish bridges between astrology and the reality that surrounds us: Ellsworth Huntington, Maki Takata, Frank A. Brown, and Giorgio Piccardi, among others. An important milestone in the history of astrology is the appearance of Michel Gauquelin’s L’influence des astres: étude critique et expérimental (1955). These are the first astrological statistics to be presented by this French psychologist and researcher. Although approaches tended to be imperfect at first, as they started from a slightly biased premise of delineation (something that the author of this book correctly points out), his statistics made a definitive breakthrough in modern scientific thought. A significant proportion of Gauquelin’s statistics have been replicated with success and have withstood refutation. Subsequently, many other researchers have published statistics that confirm, even if only in part, astrology itself. We speak of those presented by professor Suitbert Ertel or by T. Shanks, and the replications of Gauquelin’s work by Arno Müller or Suitbert Ertel (professors in European universities also). Notwithstanding the utilisation of statistical tools, a plethora of other scientific contributions have been made in recent times, encompassing a wide array of findings. This is the case of the German Theodor Landscheidt or of Dr. Percy Seymour, South African astrophysicist and astronomer.

David Bustamante’s research follows this exemplary path, undertaken in the last century by a few astrological scholars. In our field, research with a similar profile is urgently and desperately needed. The work that the reader is holding in his hands is an astrological essay that, like others that express the same sentiment, can contribute to placing astrology in the place that it undoubtedly deserves. In the face of a publishing industry dominated or characterised by ‘manuals’ full of useless cookbook interpretations, often mere copies of each other, and which hardly contribute anything to the discipline, the present study successfully distances itself from this unoriginal and grey bibliographical reality. The subject constitutes an investigation of the possible relationship between astrology and genetics, and this link or parallelism is certainly more than suggestive or tantalising: it is highly probable, based on what can be seen in this work. Both disciplines, genetics and astrology, share an undeniable reality: they are different codes with a hereditary character that present us the same reality in parallel, although in different orders. Moreover, as this essay has shown, the degree of interrelationship between the two fields is not only interesting: it is also astonishing. This connection, if not from a physical or biological standpoint, may well be at a metaphysical level of which we are only now beginning to become aware. I will not reveal here the different sections or even the essence of Astrogenesis, for it is a work that deserves to be read by the reader first hand. I can, nonetheless, say that although the correspondences that the author unveils are indeed promising, the real importance of this work lies in its seminal condition. It is a seed that has been carefully sown so that in time other researchers will pick up where Bustamante left off, developing the subject to its ultimate implications thereby, which may range from biological to philosophical.

It should be noted also that this work presents a novel and original thesis on astrology and genetics. In addition, it incorporates various transversal or multidisciplinary contents, scientific and astrological elements that serve to reinforce the foundation of the research. Furthermore, the astrological perspective of the author, which aligns with the astrology of Jean-Baptiste Morin or Dr. Weiss, pervades this study, providing his exemplary pure, profound, and scientific conception of astrology as an added value. The work is, in short, a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge in this field and a special brick in the construction of the astrological edifice. It is hoped that this contribution will receive the acclaim it merits, and that its author will continue to gift his efforts and research talent to this discipline, for the fitness of astrology itself.

JUAN ESTADELLA
Barcelona, Spain
24 January 2023

Translated from Spanish by David Bustamante