Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 1:00 pm
I can see the logic of your arggumentsteven wrote:Deb quoted Ptolemy:
Needless to say, I must really point out that "the beginning of Aries" is 0 Aries. The "beginning of Cancer" is 0 Cancer. The "beginning of Gemini" is 0 Gemini! The only equal division in his words is that of whole sign!?Assume first that the beginning of Aries is rising, so that the beginning of Capricorn is at midheaven?
?In the same way, let the beginning of Aries be setting, so that the beginning of Cancer may be at midheaven and the beginning of Gemini may be removed from the midheaven above the earth in the direction of the leading signs ??
But one of the hallmarks of Ptolemy?s work is that he does refer to specific degrees when he talks about the orient, occident and midheaven. In the next paragraph of that example he tells us to assume that the beginning of Aries is not on the angle and that the 18th degree of Taurus is on the midheaven. There are other passages where Ptolemy appears to define the midheaven and the ascendant as the specific degrees, and the associated parts/houses as the 12th-part that is succeeding to this degree. As Martin says, what we might translate as sign, we might also translate as house (and vice versa). But whichever way we look at this it is thorny issue, so I don?t want to add to any misinformation and leave the impression that I *know* exactly what was intended here! (The point of my earlier post was only to say that if I had to pick a system based purely on the available text, I would have to say equal and I do not see how anyone can claim that the whole sign argument is proven in this text).But I am very much in agreement with Steven generally, especially in the belief that too much is made of ambiguous references that are not capable of being proven one way or another. I sometimes wonder what Ptolemy would have made of these kinds of discussions ? and whether he was actually like Kepler and didn?t care much for the houses ? whichever way they were divided! In order to understand a technique it surely makes more sense to refer to sources which were clear and unambiguous. That is why I am more persuaded by the references found in contemporary works. A definition of the houses as given by Antiochus, for example, suggests that even if the references discussed above do suggest equal house division, there was more to the system than might meet the eye in Ptolemy?s work:
With regard to the use of whole-sign alongside quadrant division ? it makes perfect sense to me that in an age where accurate time was a rarity, where there were no computers to quickly refer to, and where tables were expensive and rounded up, a rough and ready approach was all that made sense in many situations, but that this would be employed alongside a more theoretically precise approach for important calculations. One thing that strikes me is that there are many reminders of the need to calculate by degree to be correct, and to not rely upon signs equating to houses, but there is not one ancient authority reminding us that the correct approach is to simply associate the places with the signs. In other words, no ancient astrologer gives instruction on how to divide the houses by the whole sign method, as many modern astrologers are now doing, (and so leaving the impression that this was always the theoretically correct thing to do).Each of these 12 places obtains as its lot the 5 pre-ascended degrees and the 25 post-ascending degrees, if the squares [ie, the angles] should occur through ninety degrees. But if they should occur with different numbers of degrees, divide the degrees of the square numbers equally into three parts, and you would know how many degrees each place of the zodiac has. (The Thesaurus, ch.46).
