It is always such a treat to be here on Skyscript, I forget why I came. I am a small boy in a candy store.

I came for this:

While I read charts by whatever means comes to hand (being essentially scatterbrained), I am coming to this simple procedure:

The sign on the ascendant has a ruling planet. That planet will be found in a given house and sign of the chart. As the ascendant is the fundamental nature the native projects, the ruling planet's house and sign tells us specifically how he does so.

The house of the sun will show his essence.

The house of the moon will show his emotional nature, for better or worse. If all three of these match our expectations, then the time is fundamentally, though not necessarily precisely, correct. I have found this to be useful.

Since Claudia Rizzi's publication of Pope Francis's birth certificate, I have been in a quandary. That certificate is dated December 17, 1936, at 21:00 hours, Buenos Aries. Presuming "21:00" to be 9:00 pm, the result, by my rules, was not a pope.

Which presumes that midnight was used as the start of the day. But I considered this most carefully. How could poor people know when midnight was? How would anyone know when midnight was?

Was it not true that, in strict law, the day had always began and ended at noon? There are charts in Lilly's Book 2 that are clearly given in this fashion, while, in Book 1, Lilly himself says we reckon the day from noon. Up until the 1980's, ephemerides were always set to noon. The Julian Day is set for noon. Never midnight. I even found it mentioned in a fleeting passage in the first act of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance:

SAMUEL: Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us. We don?t seem to make piracy pay. I?m sure I don?t know why, but we don?t.
FREDERIC: I know why, but, alas! I mustn?t tell you; it wouldn?t be right.
KING: Why not, my boy? It?s only half-past eleven, and you are one of us until the clock strikes twelve.

So I have been looking again at many English and European charts which I presume were all set in a 24 hour clock. The question is,

Was that clock set to Noon, or Midnight?

It is clear that midnight could not have been a time standard before there was a reliable supply of electricity as well as radio-based time signals. Legal documents, which birth certificates are (one of the most important of all documents) must be set to a legally ascertainable time standard, which, until fairly recently, could only be noon. Does this not make sense?

My presumption was that, as we are now all certain the day changes at midnight, that the shift, from noon to midnight, must have happened, unnoticed, during WWII. Unnoticed as I can find no record that things have ever changed.

So I set out to delineate the four Beatles. Who were all born during the war, and in Liverpool. I thought they would make a good test case. And by my rules of reading a chart, they did. They all pointed straight to noon. Not midnight.

Which, by the way, would seem to confirm stories that John Lennon was born during an air raid. Add twelve hours to his birth time and there was, in fact, an air raid in progress at that moment. Which only made sense. The Germans flew their planes under cover of night and bombed at dawn. Having dropped their loads, they flew lighter and faster back home. The reverse, flying slowly and heavily loaded through hostile enemy territory under blazing sunny skies, made no sense.

I hate to say this to an Englishman, it is not proper, but if you add twelve hours to the Queen's chart, you may be surprised. And twelve hours to her son Charles. To Di. To Camilla Parker-Bowles. To Prince Harry. Which takes us to 1984, by the way. Why did I not include Prince William? Because it seems to me that his birth time was taken from contemporary news accounts. Not official records.

So my question is, when does the day begin?

Please do not answer viscerally, from force of habit. Take the Queen's chart and play with it. Twelve hours later, look at her 12th house Moon. Has she not always kept her opinions carefully to herself? Will simple transits to the new angles explain her life, yes or no?

If you live in England, or on the Continent, go to your local hospital, find the person in charge of birth records, and ask. How do they record a birth at 1 am? At 1 pm? Is "1 am" 01:00? Is "1 pm" 13:00?

Except for American births, I have literally been driven to add 12 hours to just about everyone. Among them, Herbert von Karajan. Empress Carlota, of Mexico. Anton Bruckner. Albert Einstein. Popes Francis and Benedict. Tony Blair. I am about to apply the same trick to the chart for the incorporation of the five boroughs of New York. Not for midnight on the day, but for noon. Will be an interesting test.

Here in the States we have always had explicit AM and PM designations on our birth certificates. I suspect Canadians are similar.

I would be grateful if Skyscript could give the definitive answer.

Many thanks -

Dave

hi dave,

it is an interesting question. i think many would have considered this before and concluded the use of a 24 hour clock has the start point at midnight but i am not so sure after reading your post! this topic might be better placed in the general astrology forum which might solicit more feedback.

cheers james

Hello James,

My thanks for your note. Mostly I am confused as to where I would go to get a response, as I usually get poor ones. But do think of it.

Dave

hi dave,

wikipedia page has some relevant history on the use of the 24 hour clock that might help partly answer your question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock

from the link - "At the International Meridian Conference in 1884, Lewis M. Rutherfurd proposed:[8]

That this universal day is to be a mean solar day; is to begin for all the world at the moment of mean midnight of the initial meridian, coinciding with the beginning of the civil day and date of that meridian; and is to be counted from zero up to twenty-four hours."


james

Thanks for the link. It was similar to what I have read elsewhere. Underlying the 1884 standard was the 1880 convention, where time zones and the international date line were established. In 1880 there were no laws changed.

From the link:

In Britain, the use of the 24-hour clock in daily life has grown steadily since the beginning of the 20th century,

In a legal sense this is frankly untrue as British birth records will prove, up to as late as 1984. We really do not care what time the army and navy may use, nor do we care what the Beeb may broadcast. We are concerned with birth records only. Which are legal documents and which will adhere to legal rules.

The critical test, as I have mentioned, will be to go to a local hospital and ask how they set times on birth certificates, if 01:00 is "1:00 am" and 13:00 is "1:00 pm." If this is what is being recorded, then we need to know the date it was changed, as "01:00" was traditionally 1:00 pm.

The astrological day begins with the alignment of the centre of the Sun and the ascendant, and the astrological night begins when it aligns with the descendant; but the civil day begins and ends at midnight. That was the situation in Ptolemy's time and I'm unaware of any place or time since that has defined the civil day differently.

When Lilly says "we reckon from noon", he is not suggesting that is the start and end of the civil day - just explaining how to calculate the chart based on the astronomical tables that gave planetary positions at noon. The time was made clear by the use of am (anti-meridian) or pm (post meridian). Only an astrologer might record the time as 14 hrs pm , for 2:00 am, because the civil day has changed but the astrological day does not change until sunrise - when it gets a new planetary day and hour ruler. Well, there may have been other situations, if they had a nautical or astronomical reason that I don't know about, but there is no reason to assume that hospitals record time in a way that is different to the way most of us record time. In any case, they don't record times of birth in hospitals in England - we have to rely on other reports.

Hello Deb, I really expected better from you. I will put it down to a sheer lapse of brain power that you attribute a midnight start as far back as Ptolemy.

Apologies to have troubled you.

Or it could be that you haven't given a single credible reason why we need to add an extra 12 hours to the birth charts of "just about everyone" except Americans. And don't worry, this doesn't trouble me at all.

Dear Deb,

You are Ptolemy. You want to find midnight.

You have a SUNDIAL.

You have a WATERCLOCK.

I think it would be a good exercise for Hellenists to construct simple astrological tools and then calibrate and use them.

A sundial is basically a stick in the ground. The bigger the stick, the more accurate. You will want a big one. It can take several days of patient observation to calibrate it.

Once you've got the day divided up into 12 more or less equal hours (which is necessary because of the planetary hours / planetary days upon which time is based), you can set about to make a water clock.

A waterclock is essentially a long narrow ceramic cylinder with a tiny hole in the bottom. Fill it with water, toss in a cork to which you have attached a string.

Let the string droop down the outside. Tie a small weight to it to keep it taught.

As the water drops, the weight on the end of the string will ascend. Calibrate using your sundial. If you want your water to give "even tempered hours" you should calibrate around the equinoxes, not the solstices. The times you get will be Local Apparent. At this point you are ready to find midnight and when you do, you can compare your findings to what your computer will tell you the real LAT midnight to be.

Because you are using one measuring system - a sundial - to calibrate another - the waterclock - it would not be unexpected that your noon-time calibrations were more accurate than your midnight ones. And, as I think of it, your ONLY accurate midnight times, using a waterclock, will be at the equinoxes. Presuming you calibrated your water to an equinox. If you calibrated using the shadows of Cinco de Mayo, then your water will be useless on all other days of the year. Presuming others went mental and calibrated water for every day of the year, then reference to a simple day/night date table will let you adjust the readings on your clock to the exact day of the year, so that your water clock will match your sundial. Which is your underlying standard.

You are now ready for parlor tricks.

If your sundial is several feet high (at least), then if you have a simple weekly table, you may read the ascending degree directly from its shadow. If it is, say, 3 pm on April 10, then your table tells you the ascending degree is X of Y sign, etc.

The ancient commonly had such a table. You will remember that obelisks were many feet high and would be extremely accurate. Were they used for this purpose? If they were, the markings on the ground wore away and were forgotten long ago. There is hardly any point to an obelisk if it will not give you the time. I do not recall anyone in Napoleon's army asking the natives before they started bringing them to Europe.

But there's more.

If you know how many days it has been since the last new moon, then another simple table and a slightly different set of markings on the sundial will let you use it at night, by moonlight. Yes. You can tell the time by the moon. The difference between lunar and solar markings is that the moon travels an additional 1 degree every two hours. On the night of the full moon in spring and fall, that's 6 degrees.

Valens does not refer to the daytime/ascendant tables as I presume he presumed we all knew of them. They are so obvious. He does refer, endlessly, to the "lunar gnomon." Which, until I puzzled out the lunar mansions / nakshatras, eluded me. It might be that when Valens refers to "lunar gnomon" he is in fact referring to mansions, which Mr. Riley did not understand when he made his translation. There is still more.

While the sundial gives an hour of variable length, the water clock gives an absolute one, more or less. Putting these two together, you can determine the longest and shortest days of the year. Once you have that, you have antiscia.

Which are pairs of days, based around June 21 and December 21, which cast shadows of the same length at the same time of day, such as at noon. This has some mystical, magical meaning, though I have never, or maybe, not yet, figured out exactly what.

Valens' use of "squares" and "rectangles" as forecasting devices I have not figured out, but it has been two years since I looked at his text.

You were saying that midnight was a moment which could be determined with relative ease and accuracy by the ancients? Well, if it's the equinox and if you've got two calibrated instruments and the necessary tables, you could. It was otherwise somewhat elusive.

Clocks rely on an escapement mechanism, which took some time to perfect. Until it was, they habitually ran too fast or too slow. They can be powered either by weights, or by spring steel. Which is easily made, by the way. I do not know if the ancients had clocks. Given their clockwork ephemerides, clocks per se would not have been impossible, to be fair about it. They would still have been rare. By the late Medieval period in Europe, there was about one clock per city, in fact, and that's rare.

So far as when the day begins, the mechanical means of finding midnight are complete rubbish. Sundials are objective and absolute but they will only find noon.

So far as reading charts, you should be able to read them well enough to determine that April 21, 1926, 2:40 am, London, is the Queen and nothing but, and that April 21, 1926, 2:40 pm, is not the Queen and could never be, and be prepared to show your reasoning.

I had more, but I have been presumptuous, which is a sin.

You were saying that midnight was a moment which could be determined with relative ease and accuracy by the ancients?

No, I never said that, and I can't see the relevance of what you've written here to your argument that the Queen, and almost everyone else except Americans, has a birth time that is 12 hours out from what it should be. The argument that the Queen was born after midnight and not afternoon is that royal births, including the young Princess Elizabeth's, was reported by the Press. Even if the Queen mother was confused about whether she gave birth in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, the press would have known that difference.

You are clinging to the view that there is some legal recording of birth times in England that uses a method the public doesn't understand. There isn't. You have a child, go to the registrar and tell them the details they need to make out the birth certificate for the child. This doesn't record the time of birth.

Hi Dave

I am not following why you think we need to add 12 hours. I understand what you are saying about wateclocks, sun dials and obelisks.

However, whilst we may not always record the birthtime on our birth certificates here in Europe, backward as we may be in that regard, we do happen to have clocks.

And that's what we use when we record time: clocks. When my mother tells me the time I was born, I am under no illusion that, minutes after my birth, she dragged herself outside to the nearest obelisk that happened to be hanging around, or the nearest waterclock and recorded the for future confusion.

She just looked at a clock on the wall.

Where does your confusion come from?

Jewish tradition has the day beginning at sunset (apologies if this has already been mentioned) because the old testament said God created the earth in darkness.

But my own personal opinion astrologically is that the day begins at sunrise and the night begins at sunset (based upon sect). Bonatti suggests that the sequence of planetary hours follow what day of the week it is and the nocturnal hours start with the first nocturnal hour (though in practice it doesn't seem that the nocturnal "going about" was used).