Skyscript Astrology Forum

Michael Sternbach wrote:Yes, but did Hephaistio and/or Ptolemy actually use the term hairesis in this context?

Ptolemy obviously not. He is talking about domiciles.
About Hephaistio, about whom Schmidt says it is a paraphrase of Tetrabiblos with excerpts from Dorotheus (page viii of Hephaistio first book, Hindsight edition) it would be nice to have the quote.

margherita wrote: About Hephaistio, about whom Schmidt says it is a paraphrase of Tetrabiblos with excerpts from Dorotheus (page viii of Hephaistio first book, Hindsight edition) it would be nice to have the quote.

It is in book 1, chapter 1 of Hephaistio, where he outlines the significations of the signs of the zodiac. Hand has a footnote about it in Schmidt's translation on page 3, where they are initially perplexed about why Hephaistio says that Aries is nocturnal, and then he speculates that it may have been a variant tradition derived from the domicile assignments.

margherita wrote: Ptolemy says the same. Don't blame him
"The system of houses is of the following nature. Since of the twelve signs the most northern, which are closer than the others to our zenith and therefore most productive of heat and of warmth are Cancer and Leo, they assigned these to the greatest and most powerful heavenly bodies, that is, to the luminaries, as houses, Leo, which is masculine, to the sun and Cancer, feminine, to the moon. In keeping with this they assumed the semicircle from Leo to Capricorn to be solar and that from Aquarius to Cancer to be lunar"
Quadripartite, I,17

Good point, although in his chapter on masculine and feminine signs he does seem to conflate gender with sect:

"Again, they similarly assigned six of the twelfth-parts to the masculine and diurnal nature, and six to the feminine and nocturnal nature. The order given to them was every other one because day is always coupled to night, and female is always found close to male." Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, 1, 13: 1, trans. Schmidt, p. 28.

The confusion probably arises because there was some sort of debate in the early Hellenistic tradition about how to assign some of the sect-related rejoicing conditions to the signs.

I know of three approaches.

1. Cancer/Leo hemisphere approach. Hephaistio as mentioned.

2. Masculine as diurnal, feminine as nocturnal. Ptolemy as mentioned.

3. Signs ruled by diurnal planets as diurnal, signs ruled by nocturnal planets as nocturnal.

I think this one may have been a contender for more popular than the previous, and it is endorsed by Vettius Valens. However, the triplicity rulers scheme seems to suggest that 2. was more influential overall, and that it probably precedes Ptolemy.

Chris Brennan wrote:
It is in book 1, chapter 1 of Hephaistio, where he outlines the significations of the signs of the zodiac. Hand has a footnote about it in Schmidt's translation on page 3, where they are initially perplexed about why Hephaistio says that Aries is nocturnal, and then he speculates that it may have been a variant tradition derived from the domicile assignments.

Thanks for the quote <3
Anyway Gemini is MASCULINE in Hephaistio (page 7)
According the hemisphere's logic it should be feminine too.

Margherita

margherita wrote: Thanks for the quote <3
Anyway Gemini is MASCULINE in Hephaistio (page 7)
According the hemisphere's logic it should be feminine too.
Margherita

Not if sect and gender are being treated as separate concepts within the context of that approach. That Hephaistio seems to be treating them as separate seems to be confirmed when he talks about some of the signs like Virgo, which he lists as being diurnal and feminine. This goes back to my original point, which is that even though the later tradition ended up following Ptolemy in treating sect and gender as connected or equivalent, there was some sort of competing tradition for assigning sect to the signs in the early Hellenistic tradition that may have seen them as distinct concepts. In that scheme gender was assigned based on odd and even signs, but sect was assigned to each hemisphere based on the domicile assignments.

Chris Brennan wrote:This goes back to my original point, which is that even though the later tradition ended up following Ptolemy in treating sect and gender as connected or equivalent, there was some sort of competing tradition for assigning sect to the signs in the early Hellenistic tradition that may have seen them as distinct concepts.

Sorry, but I'm not persuaded. Why some signs are not mentioned?
And why nobody mentions this different idea of hairesis? I have almost all Bezza published and he never mentioned such a thing, and the same people wrote in the previous posts of this thread.
And which more ancient tradition considering that Hephaistio book is a comment to Tetrabiblos? The doctrine of two hemispheres in Hephaistio comes from Ptolemy.......
I checked Teucer (in Rethorius, in Holden translation), which is really a different tradition of Hellenistic astrology and he says that Taurus is feminine and nocturnal and Gemini is diurnal and masculine. Teucer for sure did not depend on Ptolemy.

Anyway, interesting thread <3

we see competing traditions all the time... i am curious why that would be a difficult concept to grasp??

margherita wrote: Sorry, but I'm not persuaded. Why some signs are not mentioned?

It is possible that a few significations were simply missing from the text, or weren't in the manuscript tradition that Pingree edited for this chapter of Hephaistio. Enough of them are preserved that there is a pretty clear pattern though. Here are the ones listed by Hephaistio:

Diurnal: Leo, Virgo, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn.
Nocturnal: Cancer, Aries, Aquarius, Pisces.

margherita wrote: And why nobody mentions this different idea of hairesis?

It is not accurate to say that "nobody" mentions this idea. Knappich recognized and mentioned it, which is what started this thread, and Hand called attention to it as a possibility in the footnote I mentioned earlier.

margherita wrote: And which more ancient tradition considering that Hephaistio book is a comment to Tetrabiblos?

Hephaistio is not a commentary on the Tetrabiblos. It draws heavily on the Tetrabiblos in some chapters, but it also draws heavily on other authors/traditions like Dorotheus. In the same chapter that deals with the signs at the beginning of Hephaistio he alternates between first listing the terms/bounds according to Dorotheus, and then he gives them according to Ptolemy. It is possible then that this alternative tradition for assigning sect to the signs of the zodiac came from Dorotheus or some other early author. Hephaistio also drew on and cites other early authors later in his work like Nechepso, Thrasyllus, Critodemus, and others. His text is a compilation from the works of many early authors then, although primarily from Ptolemy and Dorotheus.

margherita wrote: I checked Teucer (in Rethorius, in Holden translation), which is really a different tradition of Hellenistic astrology and he says that Taurus is feminine and nocturnal and Gemini is diurnal and masculine. Teucer for sure did not depend on Ptolemy.

It is not clear to me that those passages that are supposed to be from Teucer in Rhetorius haven't been updated by Rhetorius, because they include some concepts that didn't tend to be emphasized as much until later in the tradition, like the concept of detriment. It is odd that sect is not mentioned at all in the same parallel passages by Valens when he talks about the signs in Anthology 1, 2, as those passages are also supposed to be derived from Teucer. So which one represents the earlier version, the one preserved by Valens, or the one preserved by Rhetorius? Who knows.

petosiris wrote:

The confusion probably arises because there was some sort of debate in the early Hellenistic tradition about how to assign some of the sect-related rejoicing conditions to the signs.

I know of three approaches.

1. Cancer/Leo hemisphere approach. Hephaistio as mentioned.

2. Masculine as diurnal, feminine as nocturnal. Ptolemy as mentioned.

3. Signs ruled by diurnal planets as diurnal, signs ruled by nocturnal planets as nocturnal.

I think this one may have been a contender for more popular than the previous, and it is endorsed by Vettius Valens. However, the triplicity rulers scheme seems to suggest that 2. was more influential overall, and that it probably precedes Ptolemy.

Just to add 2 more by Manilius.

4. Aries - Virgo as diurnal, Libra - Pisces as nocturnal hemisphere approach.

5. Aries, Cancer, Leo, Scorpio, Sagittairus and Pisces as diurnal, the rest as nocturnal. This is the one he prefers and these are based on the trigons of Aries and Cancer - the signs of the spring equinox and summer solstice.

Knappich couldn't have read Pingree's Hephaestio edition from 1973 since he published his astrological history in 1967 and died in 1970. It's possible, though, that he used the old Engelbrecht edition of Hephaestio, and from the fragmentary allusions he reconstructed a classification of signs related to the issue of parties (haireseis) - provided he read Ancient Greek -, which he considered the right definition of hairesis. However, I think a more plausible explanation is that he read something about the parties somewhere (e.g., in Bouché-Leclercq's handbook) but what he remembered better was Ptolemy's introduction of the solar and lunar halves, possibly in Pfaff's German translation.

Just for the record: Ptolemy is the source of this division of the zodiac (even if he's not the originator of the theory); he doesn't use the expression hairesis here; Hephaestio doesn't lift this precept even though he copies or summarizes much of Ptolemy's Apotelesmatics; and the sporadic assignments in Hephaestio, collected by Chris above, would hardly make it possible to reconstruct the rationale without the aid of Ptolemy's text.

Levente Laszlo wrote: Just for the record: Ptolemy is the source of this division of the zodiac (even if he's not the originator of the theory); he doesn't use the expression hairesis here; Hephaestio doesn't lift this precept even though he copies or summarizes much of Ptolemy's Apotelesmatics; and the sporadic assignments in Hephaestio, collected by Chris above, would hardly make it possible to reconstruct the rationale without the aid of Ptolemy's text.

<3 <3 <3