p.s.-- None of the above is to deny the probability of Valens using a different house system elsewhere in the Anthologies. He seemed to compile a lot of materials from different sources.

zoidsoft wrote:This one seems to imply that a square is possible between one in the ascendant and one in the 11th. But we should have a look at the Greek here. The reason being that sometimes sextiles are regarded as squares when the signs involved happen to be those of long/upright ascension.

There is no mention of anything like that in the passage quoted. The Greek just says: Zeus Arei tetrag?nos ? ean ho men h?roskop?, ho de mesouran? ? agathodaimon?, ischuron. Literally: 'Jupiter square to Mars, when one is ascendant-ing, the other midheaven-ing or good-spirit-ing, [is] strong.' So this seems, to me, a clear indication that planets may be square by sign/degree while in houses that are in a mutual 3/11 relationship. Thanks for bringing this up, Curtis.

waybread wrote:Curtis, Deb, or.... somebody? Have you cast some of the charts in Vettius Valens? Has anybody?

Yes. But I'm not sure if anybody has actually done it with the method Valens said he used and with the ayanamsa / offset (if tropical) of 8 degrees Aries for the vernal point. Something one should do to try to confirm positions as stated in the text.

Agreed, Curtis. Yet Valens is pretty clear about whether a planet or lot is in a particular sign, in "the ascendant" or "preceding angles", or a few of the other houses, and there is only so much moving around one can do with the chart and still get the best fit with what he wrote.

Where Valens talks about the exaltation of the chart in relation to the sun and "Aries" it might make a difference if he meant 0 or 8 degrees in chart #1 (2.21). But if my ascendant (18 Libra) is reasonably close, then he probably meant a whole sign counting scheme regardless, because we still have to get the exaltation in the 11th house. With "errors" compared to Astrodienst in the P of F, I suspect that a lot (no pun intended) depends upon how he calculated the ascendant. He certainly had various methods to choose from. Someone with more patience than I have could probably work out which technique he used, or whether he simply erred.

I wonder if these charts were from Valens's own files, or whether he got them from an earlier source, given the dates.

Martin Gansten wrote:

zoidsoft wrote:This one seems to imply that a square is possible between one in the ascendant and one in the 11th. But we should have a look at the Greek here. The reason being that sometimes sextiles are regarded as squares when the signs involved happen to be those of long/upright ascension.

There is no mention of anything like that in the passage quoted. The Greek just says: Zeus Arei tetrag?nos ? ean ho men h?roskop?, ho de mesouran? ? agathodaimon?, ischuron. Literally: 'Jupiter square to Mars, when one is ascendant-ing, the other midheaven-ing or good-spirit-ing, [is] strong.' So this seems, to me, a clear indication that planets may be square by sign/degree while in houses that are in a mutual 3/11 relationship. Thanks for bringing this up, Curtis.

There is a problem here though matching to equal houses. It would make sense if say Cancer was rising and the MC is in Pisces, then Aries could be in the good spirit due to the trisection of the angles being larger in that area (having more than 30 degrees). But if using equal houses, then perfection of the aspect between Mars and Jupiter would necessarily push the one in the horoskopos to the gate of hades.

zoidsoft wrote:There is a problem here though matching to equal houses. It would make sense if say Cancer was rising and the MC is in Pisces, then Aries could be in the good spirit due to the trisection of the angles being larger in that area (having more than 30 degrees). But if using equal houses, then perfection of the aspect between Mars and Jupiter would necessarily push the one in the horoskopos to the gate of hades.

Agreed: a square to the degree from a planet in the 11th equal house would necessarily fall in the 2nd. Personally, I don't think equal houses are meant here. But even with equal houses, there could of course be a square by sign between a planet in the 1st and a planet in the 11th.

Valens is getting "curioser and curioser". I've now worked out 5 of his horoscopes (Riley transl.), roughly according to the dates of Neugebauer and Van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes and Astrodienst software. Since N & VHs' order of charts is different than Valens, this is a bit of a challenge using a Google Book, but no matter. I simply wanted to take up the challenge posed by Deb and Curtis, to see what house system gave a decent fit with Valens's data. So far I have looked at Valens 2.21 charts #1, 12, and 14; 5.10 ("sun, Venus in Aquarius" and "sun, Jupiter in Capricorn".)

As noted above, I had to peg Neugebauer and Van Hoesen's dates one day earlier than they gave. Their rising times were approximate, and sometimes an hour's or 15 minutes' difference gave a better fit with the data. Also Valens had two errors in these charts of planetary placements that could not be considered rounding error. The big difference between Valens and Astrodienst, however, was locating the Part of Fortune. Astrodienst goes by degrees, but seemingly Valens went by signs only.

I've checked out the 5 charts using whole signs, equal houses, and Porphyry and have to say that with just these five cases, whole signs gives the best fit-- but with a big caveat: generally speaking, to get the charts to work out in whole signs, (namely, with the P of F in the sign and house where Valens said it was) I usually had to put the ascendant at an early degree of its sign. Therefore, unless a planet or P of F were in an early or late degree, there wasn't much difference between whole signs or equal house in these horoscopes. Pophyry didn't work well, but then, who knows how Valens computed his MC?

But Valens sometimes gives the planetary ruler for a particular sign/house which really only works well with a whole sign system-- perhaps not so much if by "ruler" he meant sign only.

To complicate matters, Valens doesn't give birth locations. I used LMT for Alexandria, Egypt, but played a bit with Athens and Rome.

I immediately realized that Valens didn't give horoscopic or Part of Fortune degrees in many of his charts-- at least not many of the ones where houses are important, vs. some other measure. So how did Valens calculate the Part of Fortune? In these five charts, he seemed simply to count by sign. He seemed to set Aries equal to 1, Taurus to 2, Pisces to 12, and so on. He used the day and night forumulas set out earlier in the Anthologies, but basically for a night birth with Scorpio rising, sun in Capricorn, and moon in Leo, we add (8+10)-5=13, ending up around the zodiac (-12) at Aries.

No degrees, just signs. So when Valens used a derived house method counting from the P of F, he also went by signs equated to houses, generally ending up at the derived MC or 11th ("good daimon") house.

In book 5 (Riley, p. 105), just above where others have noted Valens's seeming deviation from whole signs, he basically said one has to tailor the method to the horoscope native.

"As a result of not knowing that predictions are made using many methods, and since they have devoted themselves to applying one method to every case, most men have knowledge which is nonexistent, ineffective, or careless. Those who have accurately operated with many methods and who have used a scientific system which employs many methods appropriate to the nativity possess a careful grasp of the effects of causative influences."

Valens clearly used houses in 3 different ways in the charts I looked at so far: (1) in relation to the angles, (2) in relation to thematic meanings (as he lays them out: the 3rd relates to travel, for instance), and (3) derived from the Part of Fortune set equal to the first house.

Whether he used equal houses or Porphyry in his later books would be worth investigating.

waybread wrote:The big difference between Valens and Astrodienst, however, was locating the Part of Fortune. Astrodienst goes by degrees, but seemingly Valens went by signs only.

Yes, that's exactly it. I worked out a few of those charts last summer as I was curious about his use of the Lots.
I'm of the opinion that Valens was writing, specifically those earlier chapters, for his students. He was teaching them and keeping things as simple as possible. He at least admits this in part at the end of Book 3.
(pg 70 of Riley's translation)

These chapters which I have composed may seem unprofessional because they have been addressed to a youthful audience, my students, in such a way that they might find my introduction to this art comprehensible. In view of this fact, I had wished to revise them for greater accuracy, but I have not had the opportunity

A little bit later, in book 4 he says (pg 78 )

I urge them to observe the position of the stars in degrees when necessary for determinations to the degree, to observe their positions by sign when that level of accuracy is appropriate, so that what is said will have been said truly.

So I actually think that wherever possible Valens was trying to be 'loose' and approximate and not worry about measuring things to the exact degree, both to convey the gist/meaning to his students - where obviously the simpler the better - whilst suggesting that there are contexts in which accuracy is much more needed.

I think when he is mentioning degrees specifically he tends to use a house system that isn't the whole sign system, and so I believe that really he's using whole signs as a broad 'lens' and then when necessary we need to focus more specifically with degrees. And rather than see Valens as attempting to convey right from beginning to end the way to read a chart, we're seeing a beginner's manual to astrology which takes the student through the varying techniques which we're advised require accuracy but so as to teach the principle often sticks with conveying that principle more broadly.

This is just the view I have when I read Valens, I appreciate that people see this very differently, and I have no investment in it either way. I think it's interesting to examine of course from a historical point of view, but I really feel that some context is lost if we don't recognise that Valens is writing not as a comprehensive "this is what astrologers today do" and more like a progression which took him many of his years of life and describes the journey from beginner of astrology to someone much more proficient. And just as we wouldn't take a beginner's book to astrology today and see it as a fully comprehensive account of astrology as practiced by professionals today, I don't think we should do so with all of Valens either.

But then I've not read Valens from beginning to end and I don't speak Greek, so I am happy to bow to people who are authoritative on the matter, whoever they may be.

Thanks, Paul.

I've stressed Valens's "project" as one of compilation, because he often indicates that this is what he does. He cites Petosiris frequently, often calling him "the Compiler" as well. Ptolemy seems remarkable for attempting a synthesized textbook.

You've indicated a second and equally important project of Valens, which is teaching astrology to novices. They have to walk before they can run!

We can truly sympathize with Valens, these many centuries later, in wanting to go back to his Anthologies to clean up discrepancies, but not having the time to do so.

Without having a decent index to either Riley's provisional translation or to Neugebauer and Van Hoesen's match-ups with Valens's horoscopes, it would be time-consuming to find locations where he used both degrees and house identities. I found a few of the nativities where he mentions degrees (as in predicting length of life,) but then these didn't make much use of houses. And actually without several houses or angles given as anchors for the charts, it is more difficult to reconstruct them in order to learn how Valens used house cusps.

If somebody here has got better examples than the charts I cited, I will probably have some time to reconstruct them.

Like you, Paul, I do not have a particular horse in this race. If anything, I've been sceptical of claims that whole signs were ubiquitous until late Antiquity, because from a sky-gazing perspective, it would be difficult to determine when a planet moved from one 30-degree pie-sector to the next (contra both whole signs and equal house methods, but pro Porphyry or an 8-house scheme.) With the latter, one could easily determine the locations of sunrise, MC, and sunset (or even easier, perhaps, with the moon on a clear night) and thereby set the angles. Then it is easy to measure a two- or three-part division of the southern/upper hemisphere quadrants-- using something like the ancient equivalent of a big protractor.

In favour of whole signs, they are easiest to use, notably if one is drafting horoscopes on an astrologer's board. It is interesting how few of the archaeological and "literary" horoscopes analysed by Neugebauer and his associates appeared in graphic form. Either the ancient astrologers kept the complex visual reprepresentations in their heads, graphic horoscopes have been disproportionately lost, or else they used astrologers' boards, or.....?

The more I look around in the "house problem" however, the more I realize that astrologers dealt extensively with a symbolic universe.

They also dealt with an increasingly abstract universe. Ancient astrologers and weather forecasters at a very early stage moved from sky-gazing to consulting an ephemeris, tables of rising signs, table of essential dignities, &c rather than marking positions in the heavens. Calculations of lots, length of life, derived houses, and so on, aren't in the sky any more than the Man in the Moon.

Just a final aside. I deeply respect astrologers who have learned ancient Greek, which is far more than I have done. It would be nice to get more philologists of ancient Greek and Latin on-side, as well. They are the scholars who could determine whether different sections of compiled texts came from different periods of ancient history or from different locations. I've come across a few sources from philology (like Prof. Riley) but more would be helpful to unravel the secrets of horoscopic astrology's origins.

I found this little bit from the Riley translation of Valens interesting (pg 27):

/61K/ The sun inheriting the hour or Fortune and in the Ascendant: if Jupiter is in conjunction or square, the native will be fortunate. If Mercury is also in conjunction, he will succeed through his words. If Mars is in conjunction or square along with Jupiter, the native will be great, a master of life and death. If, given the previous configuration, Saturn is square or in opposition, the native will fall into mishaps and penalties.

This is in the section about each planet when it inherits the lot or the hour (ascendant). What I find strange is that Mars is given a favorable delineation while Saturn is negative here which suggests that the Sun is below the horizon due to being contrary to sect. Maybe Valens is using equal houses after all.

Martin, what does the Greek say here? (in bold)

Hi Curtis

I'm not sure if this has any relevancy to your point or not (I'm beset with trying to sort out computer problems today, so my brain is elsewhere), but I see I have some kind of highlight across the chart published on p.22 of Schmidt's Book II (conc) & Book III). noting Fortuna in 4th shows the Sun (in 7th) was below the horizon. Not sure if that impacts on this issue but you might find it worth noting if you haven't already.

zoidsoft wrote:Martin, what does the Greek say here? (in bold)

It says ???????????, h?roskop?sas, an aorist participle meaning something like 'having horoscoped' or 'while it is horoscoping'. What exactly it means 'to horoscope' is another matter...