Hello again Deborah,

That's the exact quote from Galen (On the critical days, III, 7 Cooper translation):

For the interval which is in the month from its beginning, (ie the New Moon) to the Full Moon, which is half on the whole period of the Moon, is analogous to the interval from winter to summer.
Moreover the interval from the Full Moon to the disappearance of the Moon is analogous to the interval from summer to winter

So many astrologers followed Galen rather than Ptolemy: for example Magini, but it seems to me that in the thread with Eddy of years ago, we were discussing Della Porta:

In regard to the condition of the Moon with the Sun, they are four, as we mentioned in the comment to the third book of Galen, De diebus decretoriis. The first is the conjunction up to the first square and it is of winter, ie cold and moist; the second, from here to the opposition, is of spring, hot and moist; the third, from the Full Moon to the second square, of summer, hot and dry. The fourth eventually, from here to the New Moon, of autumn, cold and dry. (Magini, from Italian translation of De Mutatione Aeris)

For me, for the same reason I prefer a moist Ascendant, I like better Ptolemy version.

In every case I like very much the definition you gave in your last post: really the attribution of qualities to the Ascendant and Descendant, should be something else than quadrants temperament.

margherita

margherita wrote:So many astrologers followed Galen rather than Ptolemy: for example Magini, but it seems to me that in the thread with Eddy of years ago, we were discussing Della Porta:

In regard to the condition of the Moon with the Sun, they are four, as we mentioned in the comment to the third book of Galen, De diebus decretoriis. The first is the conjunction up to the first square and it is of winter, ie cold and moist; the second, from here to the opposition, is of spring, hot and moist; the third, from the Full Moon to the second square, of summer, hot and dry. The fourth eventually, from here to the New Moon, of autumn, cold and dry. (Magini, from Italian translation of De Mutatione Aeris)

I found it here: http://www.skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewt ... 6f3729dce3 in your reply 4 april 2009.
I presumed (correctly as it rurned out to be) that it was in a Venus phases/visibility thread.

Dispite all explanations, I still break my head with thinking how the applications should be on the equator/between the tropics. There are two minima and two maxima in the Sun's year cycle, instead of one minimum and one maximum. With all the complications perhaps that's worth another discussion in a different thread some day.

Eddy wrote:
Dispite all explanations, I still break my head with thinking how the applications should be on the equator/between the tropics. There are two minima and two maxima in the Sun's year cycle, instead of one minimum and one maximum. With all the complications perhaps that's worth another discussion in a different thread some day.

That's we said many times in this forum, astrology is a product of Mediterranean area enlarged to Middle East.

It's very difficult to adapt it to the Equator area, or tropics. At least the link between seasons is lost.

margherita

Eddy wrote:

I wasn?t particularly referring to Chinese astrology. Their mansions are very unequal in size and projected on the equator yet using sidereal. I know too little of the Chinese methods but my problem with the ideas of 10,000 plus years ago that there are no written sources of those periods. The oldest sources of the Chinese and most other cultures are of the 3rd millennium BC. About the Neolithic age; there also seem to be constellations in some French caves. Wasn?t there a thread about this once, with pictures etc?

Your right of course regarding written sources. However, there has been a lot of evidence to indicate astronomical/astrological practices in the Neolithic and going back long before this. If written sources were the only 'evidence' you would be putting a lot of good archaeologists out of work! It seems to me those Chinese burial remains are very strong evidence which seem to support the notion of a Neolithic origin of the 5 palaces ie the four super-constellations and the big dipper in the central palace.

The work of archaeologists and archaeo-astronomers has accumulated lots of evidence of what appears to be astronomical observation in the Neolithic and even earlier in the Palaeolithic. The pioneer was probably the archaeologist Alexander Marshak.

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/fe ... ndar/15204

http://journalofcosmology.com/Consciousness159.html

Regarding possible constellations from the Paleolithic ( ie as hunter-gatherers before humans adopted an agricultural/animal husbandry lifestyle in the Neollithic) there has been a lot of research on this.

There are a couple of good articles on Gary Thompson's website regarding possible constellations understood in Palaeolithic Europe, Siberia and North America.

http://members.westnet.com.au/Gary-Davi ... e11-1.html

http://members.westnet.com.au/Gary-Davi ... e11-2.html