hi ed,

i don't know, but i am guessing that you are wondering in right ascension verses in zodiac degree? the angles are such a critical factor and the first thing i look at when i am examining these different predictive charts too... you get different results depending on the system you set the computer to..

here is an overview from noel tyls book intro on solar arcs that you might find interesting, but it doesn't really address your question. perhaps someone who is very familiar with bonatis writing on placidus can comment...

>>The academic brilliance of Ptolemy?s System (later to be called Primary Directions) influenced mathematicians for 1,400 years! Great scholars worked overtime to try to simplify what Ptolemy had created so brilliantly: scholarly mathematicians like Antonius Maginus (around 1604) and his contemporary Valentino Naboda (Naibod, to the English) came into prominence. Maginus adapted Primary Directions into a system leading to what we now call Secondary Progressions; he still related symbolic planetary positions to the equator as Ptolemy did, but he advanced in the ephemeris one day for every year of life rather than clocking degree passage over the Midheaven.
(At the same time, during the first half of the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler [who had been an assistant to Tycho Brahe and was court mathematician, astrologer, and astronomer to the emperor Rudolph II, king of Rumania and Hungary] recognized that planets moved with variable speeds in elliptical orbits and invented some ten minor aspects. He is said to have considered that the number of days after birth that the Sun took to reach a natal planet was equivalent to the number of years of the native?s life that would elapse before the indicated influence would manifest itself.17 This is a reference contemporaneous with the work of Maginus and Naibod, preparing the way for Secondary Progressions and eventually pure Solar Arc theory.)
Naibod established the mean-motion of the diurnal Sun (59'08") as the key increment in progression?an extremely important step on the way to revelation of Solar Arc theory. Naibod?s mean arc symbolically equaled one year of life. This mean-motion is the rate of motion that divides the interval between 57' and 61' minutes of arc, the span of possible Sun motion, at a point with the same number of incidences of divergence above and below the measure, with a constant, graduated development between the two extremes.18
The great William Lilly, writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, recognized these three great systems: ?But now we come to handle the measure of time in Directions, wherein there are at this day [1647] three severall opinions, yet no such as doe make any great difference in the matter.?19 I think Lilly is saying here that we have three great theoretical systems but none of them is a clear winner.
As we have seen, the first was Ptolemy and his Primary Directions. The second measure of time was that propounded by Maginus (published in 1604), who linked himself to the recently deceased, brilliant Danish astronomer/astrologer Tycho Brahe and Doctor John Dee, an original Fellow of Sir Isaac Newton?s own Trinity College at Cambridge, an occultist and astrologer for Queen Elizabeth?s coronation.
The third measure was Naibod?s mean motion arc.
It is interesting that Maginus himself, in 1619, published Naibod?s work and evaluated it with Lilly as ?In my owne judgement, the most exactest measure that hitherto hath been found out.?20 I think the popularity Naibod enjoyed was due to the simplicity of his measure: all that was required was an elementary one-reference table.
It seems at this point in time, in the middle of the seventeenth century, that horoscopes?through Lilly?s great public exposure especially?were being drawn less and less in square format and more and more in circular format, but we do not know specifically why. I would submit, however, that occultism was a growing study among astrologers at that time, and the symbolism of the circle was of extreme importance and power in divinatory thought.
The prevailing House system had settled into the Regiomontanus system,21 but this gradually began to change with the rise in fame and importance of Placido de Titis (1603?1668), who directly followed Brahe, Kepler, Maginus, Naibod, and Lilly in prominence in the development of astrological systems.
Placidus was an Italian nobleman, who became a monk and a professor of mathematics at the University of Pavia (1657?1668). He also served as an astrology consultant to the Archduke Leopold William of Austria. Placidus wrote expert treatises on House division, Primary Directions, and the day-for-a-year system of Progressions that were ?Secondary? to Ptolemy?s Primary Directions. The Placidus material changed astrology dramatically: almost all the West adopted the Placidian House system, and Secondary Progressions came into full bloom, with simplified orientation to the ecliptic.22
Two hundred and forty-some years later, at the close of the nineteenth century, the British astrologer Sepharial23 joined the list of astrologers who had tried to simplify Ptolemy and refine Naibod?s refinements, all of them searching for an even more facile way and, indeed, a more accurate way, to capture the symbolic significance of the Sun?s movement from day to day (from year to year in terms of degrees) and apply that to the entire horoscope in terms of life time. Sepharial surveyed the scene in his The Science of Foreknowledge24: giving much credit to ?Bonattis,? an Italian mathematics professor who published (in 1687) a treatise espousing Placidus? methods, including Secondary Progressions.25 Sepharial then presents pure Naibod progression, adding the mean increment of the Sun?s motion to each planet and point in the horoscope, arcing them forward this amount in relation to the age of the individual. He then tried a ?companion? technique of taking the mean daily motion of the Moon (13?10') and applying this increment to all planets and points in the natal horoscope. And then, he confuses history by calling these Moon projections ?Secondaries.? <<

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in everything i read of alan leo, i don't recall the system of solar arc directions or 1 degree = 1 year being presented.. 1 day = 1 year is the basis for the popular term 'secondary progressions' which are different then secondary directions... to my knowledge alan leo was working with sec progs, not solar arc directions... some of the terminology can be similar which makes it a bit confusing..

Martin Gansten wrote: As far as I am aware (although I'm no expert on the modern period), the current practice of combining the primary directions of the angles with the secondary directions of all the planets into a 'progressed horoscope' originated with Alan Leo (whose grasp of the traditional technique was shaky to say the least).

Thanks Martin. Leo certainly popularized the conventional method of progressing the angles in secondaries as though they were in primaries. But Sepharial made what I consider a "half-assed" defense of the progressed angle method in his "Manual of Occultism" and also referred to Zadkiel as approving of them as a "good enough" approximation of PDs to the angles. I believe they preceded him with this nonsense.

James, as far as that Tyl quote, I can't even start to comment on its distortions. Well, OK, how about Lilly was a very sloppy mathematician
http://issuu.com/considerations/docs/14-1 p57, and should not be considered a great judge of this aspect of astrology.

- Ed

ed,

take what is useful and leave the rest... i offered in in a spirit of trying to be helpful, like you have been to me in the past.. if it is of no help - ignore it....

james_m wrote:ed,

take what is useful and leave the rest... i offered in in a spirit of trying to be helpful, like you have been to me in the past.. if it is of no help - ignore it....

My comments were definitely not in the spirit of insulting you. Keep on keeping on.

- Ed

let me try to unravel something for myself then and perhaps others here will have some useful ideas to offer on this...

as i understand it a chart is static - fixed - based off a time that is considered of significance - birth of a person and etc. etc.

to talk about directing a planet, but not the angles baffles me.. perhaps there is some rationale for moving some of the points in the chart but not others, so i am curious if someone could articulate this for me... let me add, that i don't ask this based on what was done in the past, so much as understanding the rationale behind it.. thanks!

james_m wrote:let me try to unravel something for myself then and perhaps others here will have some useful ideas to offer on this...

as i understand it a chart is static - fixed - based off a time that is considered of significance - birth of a person and etc. etc.

to talk about directing a planet, but not the angles baffles me.. perhaps there is some rationale for moving some of the points in the chart but not others, so i am curious if someone could articulate this for me... let me add, that i don't ask this based on what was done in the past, so much as understanding the rationale behind it.. thanks!

Suppose we decide for some reason that one sidereal day reflects one tropical year (this is one kind of "secondary" direction). And to keep it astronomical, we consider the tropical motion of the sun and the sidereal motion of some reference point on the equator, say the RAMC.

So to determine a progressed event, we can look at a transit event and determine how far the sun has moved in celestial longitude since the radix, including cycles. We can now move the natal RAMC the same number of degrees, and find out when that occurs to determine the progressed time. Erect a chart for this event time and the location of the native at the time. Note that the RAMC moves through 360 degrees of right ascension between two solar returns. Not naibod, solar arc or any such measure in advance of the natal RAMC.

IMO, this is a correct secondary progressed chart, using the "quotidian" method of moving the cusps.

The conventional method is to separate the calculation of the planets' positions, which are done as above (with some variation), and to use a distinct method for the cusps. As far as I can tell this became popular in the late 19th and early 20th century as a shortcut to seeing PDs to the cusps in a secondary progressed chart. But the resulting pseudo PDs (conjunctions to cusps) are way off in their timing.

- Ed

ed, your example relates to secondary progressions.

i don't use 1 day = 1 year - secondary progressions..

i do use 1 degree = 1 year - solar arc directions..

4'= 1 year - i understand to be primary directions..

i continue to question why it's okay to direct the planets, but not okay to direct the angles using primary directions.. maybe it is not something simple, and the reason i am not able to understand this is my failure to understand the astronomy of it. i still maintain the chart is static.. transits aren't static.. directions and progressions of various sorts on the other hand are symbolic... i think it is a good question to ask how they relate astronomically also...

Yeah, we're on different wavelengths here. Onward...

Martin wrote:

The angles, having no secondary motion, cannot be directed using secondary directions (which is what Placidus called them); and as Placidus accepted only the five Ptolemaic significators, he was left with only the Sun and Moon to direct in this fashion. He may perhaps have considered the secondary directions of some other planet in the relatively rare instances where such a planet would qualify as hyleg according to Ptolemy's criteria; but I can't recall seeing an instance of this (perhaps Margherita would know?).

I remember being really confused by the angles in SP charts for ages. Why if the system was based on day for a year did the angles not move faster? Noone else I spoke to seemed to know why this was so either.

In the pre-internet era it took me a while to find a source explaining the angles of the chart are moving through primary not secondary motion. As has been suggested the marriage of the two is not really logically consistent. If one is going to use SPs as a self consistent system it seems more logical to progress the angles at the same rate as the planets. I assume this is how the technique of Quotidian secondary progessions developed. I have never used that particular technique but it does sound interesting with the degrees of the angles changing on a daily basis.

''Quotidian? comes from the Latin word for ?daily? and refers to the daily motion of the Midheaven. In a 24-hour period, the Midheaven doesn?t move just 1 degree; it moves 360 degrees. In other words, during the day/year of the progressed chart, the houses will have made a complete cycle just as they do in real time. While the planets don?t move any faster in a Quotidian Secondary Progressed chart, they do change houses and contact the house cusps, and this is could presumably pick up significant events.

My current Solar Fire software doesn't seem to calculate Quotidian secondary progressions. Any other suggestions on software that does? I would really like to try these out!

Mark

James_M wrote:

in everything i read of alan leo, i don't recall the system of solar arc directions or 1 degree = 1 year being presented.. 1 day = 1 year is the basis for the popular term 'secondary progressions' which are different then secondary directions... to my knowledge alan leo was working with sec progs, not solar arc directions... some of the terminology can be similar which makes it a bit confusing..

It was a group of British astrologers -Vivian Robson, Sepharial and later Charles Carter that really popularised solar arcs. However, they described them as 'the radix system'. Their version varied slightly from the popular version of solar arcs used today since they progressed the chart a standard 1 degree annually in all cases rather than accounting for the variable daily motion of the Sun throughout the year. They also varied from a lot of modern astrologers like Tyl in looking at trines and sextiles not just the hard aspects.

Mark

mark,

i have solarfire 7.3.1
in the preferences menu -> edit settings ->progs/dirns -> you will see a drop down menu with options SA in RA, SA in Long, Naibod in RA, Naibod in Long and finally Mean in Quotidan... not sure if this is the same as what is under discussion or if you have a version 7.3 or not, but this is an option i have on my version of solarfire..

thanks for the info on solar arc directions history.. i see carter mentioning this in the zodiac of the soul 1928.. i wonder when this system actually originated?