Hello,

I have just learned that Masha'allah used a sidereal zodiac (sassanian) with Dorothy of Sidon terms in natal astrology (cf. Holden's History, AFA). Does anyone know more about this and what happen to this technique? Was it simply migrated to tropical?

What Holden says in his History of Horoscopic Astrology is:

Masha'allah was familiar with Persian and Indian astrology and is said to have used ... a set of astronomical tables compiled for Shah Khusrau Anushirwan in the sixth century. These were based on an earlier Indian set and therefore were referred to a fixed zodiac.

Unfortunately for the reader, Holden does not say who said that about Masha'allah. There is no direct citation. He does cite, elsewhere, The Astrological History of Masha'allah by David Pingree and E.S. Kennedy and perhaps there is more information in that text.

It is interesting that Masha'allah's greatest pupil, Abu Ali al Khayyat used whole sign houses. One might expect that he would have used a fixed zodiac as well.

Tom

Hello,

From a first reading of Pingree's book, Masha'allah seemed to have work with the named sassanian tables in mundane astrology (his History) but has only copied Dorothy's examples. He would have used both zodiac then (sic)... We must stand by Hand's comment (On recpetions): ?...We are left not having a clear picture as to what the old writers intended, if they had a clear intention at all, concerning the manner of measuring positions"...

I checked out once one chart from Masha'allah, that on Rob Hand's site here http://www.robhand.com/recept.htm
One can find a chart resembling this using the sidereal Raman zodiac at 13th February 791 at 3 PM Universal Time, Bagdad, Iraq. The planets are of course not exactly where Solar Fire puts them, but Masha'allah probably didn't have SF . You cannot reproduce the chart with the tropical zodiac, so the chart seems to be sidereal.

The interesting question now is, if people were using sidereal zodiac in the last centuries of the first millennia, why did they change to tropical? Did it start to seem that the sidereal zodiac didn't work, and they had to find alternatives? Because if everything had been okay, there probably would not have been need for a change.