The Treason Of The Blue Books And Astrological Transits
Few government reports have acquired a place in Welsh cultural memory quite like the three volumes presented in 1847 under the unremarkable title Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales.
The inquiry contained valuable evidence about the condition of schools, teachers, poverty and attendance. Yet it also moved far beyond education, passing sweeping judgements on the Welsh language, Nonconformity and the moral character of the population. Its treatment of Welsh women caused particular anger. What began as an investigation into schooling consequently became remembered as Brad y Llyfrau Gleision , the Treachery, or Treason, of the Blue Books.
The National Library of Wales records that the work was completed by April 1847 and R. R. W. Lingen presented his report to the Government on 1 July. That gives us a useful date around which to examine the astrology. No reliable presentation time is known, so it would be misleading to construct houses or angles and treat them as historical fact. Instead, we can look at the planetary transits surrounding 1 July 1847 and ask what kind of symbolic atmosphere accompanied one of the most controversial documents in modern Welsh history.
Why Was Wales Being Investigated?
The inquiry did not emerge from nowhere. Wales had experienced substantial social unrest during the preceding years, including the Chartist movement, the Newport Rising of 1839 and the Rebecca Riots. To Victorian reformers, education was frequently presented as a remedy for disorder, poverty and perceived social backwardness.
In March 1846, William Williams, the Welsh-born MP for Coventry, called in the House of Commons for an investigation into education in Wales, with particular emphasis on the opportunities available to working people to learn English. The Government agreed, and R. R. W. Lingen, Jelinger C. Symons and Henry R. Vaughan Johnson were appointed as commissioners.
The commissioners themselves did not speak Welsh. They depended substantially upon assistants, translators and witnesses when examining predominantly Welsh-speaking communities. The WJEC's historical summary also notes an important contradiction: although the reports criticised Welsh educational standards, evidence within them could show literacy levels comparable with, and sometimes better than, those in England.
The most enduring controversy arose when observations about schooling became observations about an entire culture. Welsh language use was presented as an impediment to progress, Nonconformity came under criticism and witnesses supplied highly damaging assessments of Welsh morality. Working-class women were among those subjected to particularly broad and derogatory generalisations.
The reports therefore became two things at once: a valuable historical source on nineteenth-century Wales and a document whose assumptions about language, class, religion and culture caused profound offence.
When Did The “Treason” Become The Treason?
There is another historical detail worth keeping straight. The familiar name was not the official title of the report, nor was it necessarily attached to the volumes immediately on 1 July 1847.
Robert Jones Derfel later used Brad y Llyfrau Gleision as the title of his 1854 satirical drama attacking the inquiry and the evidence behind it. The phrase took hold so successfully that it became the name through which generations subsequently remembered the affair. The National Library's account of Derfel's work describes how he transformed the commissioners into demonic spies and portrayed those who supplied hostile evidence as betraying Wales.
That later response matters psychologically. The Blue Books did not merely provoke disagreement over educational policy; they helped create a counter-narrative in which Wales had been misrepresented by outsiders and needed to answer for itself.
The Sky On 1 July 1847
On 1 July the Sun was at approximately 9 degrees Cancer, Mars at approximately 10 degrees Aries, Jupiter at 1 degree Cancer, Neptune at the beginning of Pisces and Saturn around 13 degrees Pisces. Mercury had recently entered Leo, while Uranus and Pluto were both travelling through Aries.
Astrological ephemerides show that several important aspects clustered very closely around the presentation of the report. Jupiter had perfected a trine to Neptune on 27 June. The Sun was moving into an exact square with Mars, perfected on 3 July, followed by a trine to Saturn on 5 July. These are transiting relationships in the sky rather than aspects to a verified national horoscope for Wales, and that distinction matters.
Even so, their symbolism is unusually evocative.
Sun Square Mars: Authority Meets Conflict
The closest major aspect on 1 July was the approaching square between the Cancer Sun and Mars in Aries. By around midday the aspect was within approximately one degree, becoming exact two days later.
In mundane astrology, the Sun can symbolise authority, government, leadership and the conscious purpose behind an act. Mars represents assertion, conflict, attack and the force through which one position encounters another.
The square makes the relationship difficult rather than cooperative.
It is not hard to see why this aspect is interesting in retrospect. A report issued under government authority was about to become the focus of a cultural confrontation. Its authors understood themselves as investigating and proposing improvement; many Welsh readers encountered passages they experienced as an attack upon their language, religion and national character.
The signs add another layer. Cancer is associated astrologically with home, belonging, ancestry and the instinct to protect what is one's own. Aries emphasises assertion and the willingness to push forward without waiting for consensus.
We should not turn that symbolism into a claim that Mars “caused” the controversy. The historical causes are contained in the evidence, methodology, assumptions and language of the reports themselves. What astrology offers is a striking image of authority colliding with defensive questions of identity and belonging.
Jupiter Trine Neptune: The Danger Of The Noble Mission
The Jupiter-Neptune trine may be even more revealing psychologically.
Jupiter had just entered Cancer and was approximately one degree from a trine with Neptune in Pisces, an aspect that had perfected only a few days earlier. Both planets can be associated with large visions. Jupiter enlarges belief, morality, education and social philosophy; Neptune can represent ideals, collective imagination and compassion, but also projection and the blurring of distinctions.
Together they can describe an inspiring vision. They can also describe the danger of becoming so convinced of the righteousness of an ideal that inconvenient realities disappear inside it.
That makes the combination particularly thought-provoking in relation to Victorian ideas of improvement.
The inquiry genuinely encountered inadequate schools, poverty and serious educational problems. The error was not necessarily in believing education could improve people's lives. The problem came when a particular model of improvement became entangled with assumptions that English language and Anglican or English cultural norms represented advancement, while Welsh-speaking culture could be interpreted as an obstacle to it.
Jupiter-Neptune provides an apt symbolic warning: a mission presented as benevolent can contain projection when the people being “improved” are not understood on their own terms.
Education, Morality And The Expansion Of Judgement
Jupiter's connection with education makes the transit particularly appropriate, but the planet also has traditional associations with religion, law and moral judgement. The Blue Books crossed all three territories. What began as an inquiry into schools widened into an assessment of religion, language, family behaviour and morality.
Neptune complicates the picture because evidence can become difficult to separate from cultural assumption. The commissioners gathered enormous quantities of information, but they were also dependent upon witnesses whose perspectives were not necessarily representative of the communities being judged.
The result was an official document containing empirical material alongside highly subjective conclusions. Astrologically, the distinction between fact and projection is precisely where Neptune deserves attention.
Saturn In Pisces: When Judgement Becomes Institutional
Saturn was moving slowly through Pisces and was retrograde by the beginning of July. The Sun was approaching a trine with Saturn, exact on 5 July.
Saturn represents institutions, rules, authority and the structures through which ideas acquire durability. Pisces is far less definite, concerned symbolically with permeability, collective feeling and boundaries that are difficult to maintain.
This pairing can be read as an attempt to impose institutional form upon something culturally complex.
That too resembles the central difficulty of the inquiry. Education in Wales was fragmented among Sunday schools, charity schools, private provision and religious organisations. The communities being examined did not fit neatly into a single state system, and the language spoken by much of the population differed from that of government administration.
The report attempted to make this complicated landscape legible to the state. In doing so, it also helped institutionalise certain judgements about what progress ought to look like.
The long-term history should not be simplified into the claim that the Blue Books alone caused the decline of Welsh. English was already associated with economic and social advancement, and Welsh attitudes towards English-language education were themselves complicated. Nevertheless, historians have identified the reports as an important reinforcement of the stigma surrounding Welsh in education and public life.
Mercury And The Power Of The Written Word
Mercury had entered Leo only two days before the 1 July presentation, following a square to Pluto on 27 June. The exact Mercury-Pluto aspect had begun separating by the time the report reached government, so it should not be exaggerated, but its proximity is interesting.
Mercury concerns documents, testimony, language and the transmission of information. Pluto, in modern astrology, is associated with power, exposure and the capacity of words or ideas to alter what lies beneath a situation.
Few examples could demonstrate the political force of language more clearly than the Blue Books.
The volumes did not simply describe Wales. Their language helped create an image of Wales which Welsh writers then had to contest. The controversy generated essays, periodical writing, political debate and eventually Derfel's famous satire. A state document therefore became part of a larger struggle over who possessed the authority to describe Welsh society.
That question remains surprisingly modern: who gets to define a community, and what happens when an official description bears little resemblance to the way that community understands itself?
The Shadow Of The Blue Books
From a Jungian perspective, the episode invites another interpretation. Groups, like individuals, can project unwanted characteristics onto others. A society invested in seeing itself as civilised, disciplined and morally advanced may become especially sensitive to qualities it labels disorderly, backward or immoral elsewhere.
The Blue Books can therefore be read not only as a report about Wales but as a document revealing assumptions within Victorian British authority itself.
That does not mean every criticism in the reports was false. Educational provision genuinely required improvement. The more psychologically interesting issue is why shortcomings in schooling became connected with sweeping judgements about language, religion and sexual morality.
Projection frequently works by taking something partly real and expanding it into a total identity. One badly run school becomes evidence about a people. One witness's moral judgement becomes a cultural conclusion. Difference becomes deficiency.
The astrology around July 1847 , particularly Jupiter-Neptune and Sun-Mars , offers a useful symbolic vocabulary for that process: certainty about moral improvement alongside a confrontation over identity.
What Remained After 1847
The enduring significance of the Blue Books lies partly in the response they provoked. Welsh writers challenged the descriptions, defended Nonconformity and contested the treatment of Welsh women and the language. The very act of being described from outside helped intensify debates about Welsh identity from within.
The National Library of Wales argues that the reports had a lasting psychological effect, strengthening the idea that social advancement required English and contributing to insecurity about the public standing of Welsh. Later historians have debated the exact extent of that influence, but the reports unquestionably became an important reference point in discussions of language, education and cultural confidence.
For Wilfred Hazelwood Astrology, the event is also a useful example of how mundane astrology can be approached responsibly. We do not need to pretend that planets dictated the contents of three Victorian government volumes. Nor do we need an invented birth chart for Wales to notice the symbolism of the sky surrounding their presentation.
The Sun was approaching conflict with Mars while Jupiter and Neptune magnified questions of belief, morality and improvement. Saturn brought the institutional dimension into view, while Mercury reminds us that this particular conflict was fought above all through language.
The Blue Books attempted to define Wales.
What followed was a struggle over whether Wales would accept that definition.
