About Robert Schmidt
Robert Schmidt is best known for creating the field of Hellenistic Astrology. He is responsible for bringing forward key astrological concepts now fundamental to any study of Hellenistic Astrology such as the concept of sect, the whole sign house system, zodiacal releasing, angular triads, testimony concepts, the classical meanings of the planets and their nature, and much more.
At once legendary and obscure, Schmidt began his work as a philosopher, studying both ancient and modern thinkers in their original languages: Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Apollonius, Pappus, Aquinas, Descartes, Galileo, Viete, Newton, LaGrange, Abel, Galois, Gauss, Grassmann, Boole, Riemann, Mandelbrot, Faraday, Maxwell, Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and more.
In 1993, together with Robert Hand and Robert Zoller, Schmidt and his wife Ellen Black founded Project Hindsight. Project Hindsight’s mission was to translate and interpret the surviving texts of the Western astrological tradition. As such, it was the continuation of the work of The Golden Hind Press, a publishing company founded by Ellen Black, Clifford Martin, and Robert Schmidt in 1985.
Schmidt brought his intimate understanding of Ancient Greek thought to his translations and equally importantly, to his reconstruction of the original astrological system. Because the source texts survive only in fragments, and because of the esoteric compositional devices used by the original authors, the original system was not self-evident by simply producing the translations. It was Schmidt’s lifework to understand and transmit the astrology, which he called “The System of Hermes.”
Schmidt’s decades-long search for the original astrology of the West was akin to an Indiana Jones quest; following clues from various texts, piecing together bits of lore and finding patterns in the system that would point to an underlying philosophical framework, and then applying that philosophical framework forward to illuminate fragmentary doctrine. Robert’s work on Eudoxus was supported by independent, non-astrological, historical work by his wife Ellen Black, which will be released through Project Hindsight as well.
Like so many great thinkers, Robert Schmidt has been heavily plagiarized. Because of this, many genuine students of astrology don’t realize that they can honor Schmidt as their teacher, and they have missed out on the opportunity to learn directly from him. We hope to rectify that by offering a record of Schmidt’s teachings here. We continue to bring new, exciting, unpublished work to the archive.
Students can follow Schmidt’s teachings from the earliest days of the PHASE lectures to his crowning achievement of the Eudoxus Files, with all of his incredible interpretations of astrological techniques in between. We bring the receipts! There is nothing like a Robert Schmidt lecture.
For a more detailed article about Robert Schmidt’s life work, please see here:
https://projecthindsight.net/about-robert-schmidt