Skyscript Astrology Forum

Mark, thanks. If a library in my province has the book I can probably get it through Interlibrary loan, but it would take a few weeks! Any chance that someone on this site who knows Dr. Greenbaum could convince her to post the article on-line?

Nixx (alias Charley, Rusty, Language, &c.) How nice to hear from you again. Perhaps I could let Plutarch, himself a priest at Apollo's temple at Delphi, respond to your question.

"Therefore, Clea, whenever you hear the traditional tales which the Egyptians tell about the gods, their wanderings, dismemberments, and many experiences of this sort, you ... must not think that any of these tales actually happened in the manner in which they are related.... If, then, you listen to the stories about the gods... accepting them from those who interpret the story reverently and philosophically [i.e., allegorically]... you may avoid superstition which is no less an evil than atheism."

The Egyptian narratives of the passage of the deceased through different stages in the after-life maps pretty well onto Hellenistic astrological house meanings, but the Egyptian meaning was deeply spiritual. I'll give examples for each house, time permitting, and unless I (hopefully) hear from someone that this has already been worked out by someone else.

What we see in an author like Vettius Valens of Alexandria, in contrast, is a very practical discipline of genethliacal astrology, much of it oriented towards determining the client's length of life, material success, and here-and-now personality traits. So the "house of the child" (#5) no longer refers to the divine child Horus or Harpocrates, but to the clients' own children. The house of the Father (#4) no longer refers to the soul's unification with the divine Father as a spiritually regenerative rite of passage, but refers to the client's own father.

There are several ways to look at this shift: (1) as part of a Greek philosophical or religious system, an "as above, so below" transfer from the celestial to the terrestrial (depending upon one's horoscope.) (2) Or, that the esoteric meanings of Egyptian houses were either (a) hidden by initiated astrologers or (b) simply unknown to the uninitiated ones, who picked up texts on house meanings without understanding their esoteric intent.

There are some interesting allusions in several of the ancient astrology texts. Firmicus Maternus (4th century AD, and a religious pagan at the time he wrote his treatise) prayed to a trinity of deities as well as to the moon and stars (in 4: preface) for pardon if he impiously revealed material that should be kept hidden "Our purpose is to convey to the temples [of Jupiter] of the Tarpeian Rock [an execution site near Rome] whatever the divine ancients of Egypt brought forth from their shrines."

While we have to reserve wholesale adoption of ancient astrologers' comments on the authority of Egyptian antiquities, perhaps these comments about Egyptian shrines do point us in the right direction.

waybread wrote:Nixx (alias Charley, Rusty, Language, &c.) How nice to hear from you again.

We can safely add trevor and lisa to the mix, I think.

Waybread,

I can't grasp the relevance of Plutarch to my question. but speculate with Valens this could be the emergence, and assimilation, of the demiurge as mundane intellect. So not exactly what we mean today by Philosophical Materialism.

Anyway, possibly a slight tangent to your mission.

Hello Mark and All:

I came here to discuss the years given to the planets in the firdar and I saw your post and read the thread. I?m not very much into the egyptian astrology, but in last november I attended to a workshop with Nick Campion about the beginning of astrology and one of the things that I can remember pretty well is that egyptien used the decans to pray. They were linked with some stars or constelations. Perhaps each one had a meaning, since when we pray we pray for rain, for have enough grain, for health, etc .
But this does not mean, IMO, that this means a division of the sky in topics as we see in Greece.
As you observed the division according to the decans would fall in places that have nothing to do with the houses in the way they were used later.

Just some thoughts:-)

Mark wrote:I am intrigued by the ancient text known as the Salmeschoiniaka which appears to be the earliest text on the astrological houses mentioning topics or areas of life in a work on horoscopic astrology.

The text is traditionally associated with Nechepso and Petosiris legendary founders of horoscopic astrology in Egypt along with Hermes Trismegistus. Only fragments of this work survive, but fortunately a piece quoted by Hephaistio of Thebes employs the 36 decans as places having governance over special issues. (II 18 [219]

Robert Schmidt translates this as follows:

One must also examine the decans since the first one of the Horoskopos deals with birth; the 28th from the Horoskopos, which culminates early, deals with livelihood; the 25th, which culminates at noon, deals with sickness; the 9th, which rises late in the east, deals with injury; the 17th, which rises in the west, deals with marriage and wife; the 8th, the door of Hades, deals with children; the one in the subterraneous [pivot] deals with death. (II.18).

I don?t know if this is the entire fragment or just a selection? It would be interesting to see a different translation of the text too.

There are fascinating parallels and contrasts to later astrology. For example, we see the 17th decan linked to marriage. This equates reasonably closely to the descendant in later astrology. Although it appears to be located in what would be below the ASC/DESC axis in the 6th house by WS. Just why it falls here below the horizon is unclear. It also falls short of a full 180 degrees from the ascendant. The eighth decan carries the association of children which is later assigned the fifth house. However, the decan would fall in the third house by WS. Its title 'Gate of Hades' was a title referring to second house in later hellenistic astrology. The ninth decan 'rises late in the east'. This decan would appear to fall in the 3rd WS house next to the IC. Is this a reference to it being the last decan in the eastern quadrant? This could be seen diurnally in terms of being the last decan in that quadrant from which planets rise. However, the portions from the IC-ASC are usually described as western?? Could the text be describing the whole hemisphere from MC/IC as eastern? The 25th decan would fall in the beginning of the ninth by whole sign house. Why sickness? Of this area would later be a cadent house. Still as it is linked to the Sun at midday one would have expected its link to the MC to make it connect to public matters. Instead livelihood seems linked to the 28th decan which would equate well to the 10th WS house. Equally we see a parallel in assigning the subterranean pivot to death. Although the 8th house normally takes this association there is a connection to death relating to the fourth house/IC in the ancient astrologers description of the life cycle through the four angles/quadrants. Of course the above analogies to whole sign houses only work in a very idealized way with the ASC forming the first decan in a whole sign house.

Maybe it would be helpful to separate decans from houses. They might overlap nicely, but they might not. The decans initially were star clusters on the ecliptic-- and some would say, off the ecliptic, as well. They were used in the Egyptian solar calendar to schedule both environmental and cultural sorts of events. So their closest analogy today would be signs and segments of signs, but that wasn't their original meaning.

Just possibly we pick up some remnants of this thinking in Ptolemy's discussion of fixed stars.

Unless we wish to equate signs and houses, we kind of have to see houses in the horoscope as something non-rotating, something fixed. The decans rotate through fixed houses. Probably someone has worked out all of this (I'm still looking, in research mode) but we would have to ask whether, then, the Egyptian decans were geared towards and equinox in Aries or even Taurus; or perhaps something else like the rising of the star Sirius, at the start of the Egyptian new year.

I think the diurnal association of Egyptian houses with the sun's passage (assuming for the sake of argument that these houses existed) is pretty mappable.

The descendant/7th house, for example, had clear goddess associations. It is the place where Isis becomes Nepthys, but other goddesses were associated with the sunset on the horizon, as well, in typical Egyptian syncretistic style. From this, I think a male-oriented Hellenizing astrology got the idea that the West had to do with women, and that women had to do with marriage. Although the DS symbolized the "death" of the sun in the part of the horizon where Egyptians buried their dead; yet the association of the West with death was not truly negative: it was the departure point for the soul through the afterlife, and was thus associated with regenerative potential.

I've always wondered why the 8th "house of death" preceded the 7th house, with diurnal motion of the sun. I think the reason was because the mid-afternoon sun in a hot country like Egypt was truly withering of life. This time of day was associated with the lion-headed goddess Sekhet, a destroyer.

Nixx, I didn't use the term "materialist" in a philosophical sense. Its plain meaning is a concern with things that are primarily physical in nature (think "matter" or "earth element") rather than mental or spiritual. The Hellenistic astrologers had all kinds of predictions about the native's property and riches (or lack of them.)