Skyscript Astrology Forum

On Seven Star Astrology website I find this text:

http://www.sevenstarsastrology.com/astr ... gressions/

Anthony wrote:[...]there?fore, it has been sur?pris?ing to find that sec?ondary pro?gres?sions were also dis?cussed by Vet?tius Valens, over 1500 years prior to their inde?pen?dent inven?tion by Placidus. Unlike pri?mary direc?tions, sec?ondary pro?gres?sions were not wide?spread in Hel?lenis?tic astrol?ogy. Like many other pre?dic?tive tech?niques, evi?dence of their use in that era sur?vives only in the work of Valens.

Valens dis?cussed two meth?ods of sec?ondary pro?gres?sions in the final book, Book IX, of his Anthol?ogy. The first is the stan?dard method in which one deter?mines the age of the native, and then adds that many years in days to the birth date and looks at the tran?sits to the natal chart on that day.

[Begin quote Valens]"It is nec?es?sary to cal?cu?late as fol?lows: add a num?ber of days to the birth date equiv?a?lent to the age (in years) of the native. Then, hav?ing first deter?mined the date, whether in the fol?low?ing month or in the birth month itself, cast a horo?scope for that day. <See> which star, if any, is in the Ascen?dant or is com?ing into con?junc?tion with another star, and whether it is mov?ing from an angle to a point fol?low?ing or pre?ced?ing an angle, or from a point <fol> pre?ced?ing an angle to an angle, or whether it was ris?ing at the date of the deliv?ery but is now set?ting or com?ing to some unre?lated phase, or to some?thing bet?ter. You may con?sider these to be the peri?odic fore?casts." [End quote Valens] (Valens, Antholo?gies, Book IX, Ch. 3, Riley trans., 2010, p. 154)

It is pretty cool to see Valens using this sym?bolic ratio?nale of equat?ing smaller units of astro?log?i?cal time with larger units of time in one?s life, and it cer?tainly opens the door for val?i?dat?ing the type of think?ing that goes into other sim?i?lar sym?bolic pro?gres?sions, such as ter?tiary pro?gres?sions (each day after birth rep?re?sents a lunar month of life) and solar arc direc?tions (each planet and point pro?gresses at the same rate in one year as the Sun does in a day fol?low?ing the birth).

As I am very interested in the problems of "Who did first mention a certain technique and when?" I would like to hear the opinions of experts* for Vettius Valens and/or Placidus. My special questions are:

1. Is it correct at all to use the term secondary progressions, because: are there primiary directions? If not, why not say then: secondary directions?
To the best of my remembrance in the Latin text of Astrologia Gallica profections are called "progressiones" by Morin, thus primary progressions in English perhaps, opposite to the secondary progressions above?

2. How do you rank the Riley-translation? Does Riley himself see his translation more like a test version? But is Possibly better then other end versions?
But who else did translate Vettius Valens, and how would you rank these? Which is the best in your opinion?

3. Can you give a quotation of Placidus, teaching progressions?
And if possible a link to the text in facsimile?!

4. Are the conclusions of Anthony correct at all, or is there an error in the translation perhaps? I wonder because the progressions 'of this kind' are generally allotted to Placidus.

Hopefully the multiplicity of "?"'s does not offend you but the fact, progressions 'of this kind' should be so old is fascinating me, and I would appreciate to be helped in classifying all these rightly.

Johannes

*may really nobody feel excluded from discussion by this term, please!

The idea "a day for a year" is so old that it is in the Bible...

"Then God said to Ezekiel,
'Now lie on your left side for 390 days
to show Israel will be punished for 390 years
by captivity and doom.
Each day you lie there represents
a year of punishment ahead for Israel.
Afterwards, turn over and lay on your right side
for 40 days, to signify the years of Judah's punishment.
Each day will represent one year . . .'"

(Ezekiel 4:4-6)

zoidsoft wrote:The idea "a day for a year" is so old that it is in the Bible...

Thank you for the quotation of such a proper biblical allegory , Curtis!

But to know an allegory does not mean to use it in astrology. And you surely agree with me that no one used this key, whether known from the Bible or not, in the form of progressions before Placidus, if not Vettius Valens was the first astrologer to apply progressions or at least to explain their practice.

Johannes

Vettius Valens listed a truly staggering number of astrological techniques. The so-called "Porphyry" houses pre-date Porphyry by a couple of hundred years and are first found in Valens -- who in turn attributes them to an earlier astrologer!

However, I think it is unlikely that secondary progressions were in common use during the Hellenistic period. Aside from the highly interesting passage quoted at the beginning of this post, I have not seen the technique referred to elsewhere in the Hellenistic repertoire. (This does not preclude the possibility that references may eventually be found in portions of the CCAG as yet untranslated.)

Valens often goes into great detail about his favorite techniques, with the complete profected chart, the Releasing from Fortune and Spirit, and prediction by planetary periods taking up a fair number of pages. The brevity of his statement quoted here, and the fact that references to secondary progressions are not (yet) found elsewhere, may suggest that someone had indeed thought of the idea but it never went into common usage.

johannes susato wrote:

zoidsoft wrote:The idea "a day for a year" is so old that it is in the Bible...

Thank you for the quotation of such a proper biblical allegory , Curtis!

But to know an allegory does not mean to use it in astrology. And you surely agree with me that no one used this key, whether known from the Bible or not, in the form of progressions before Placidus, if not Vettius Valens was the first astrologer to apply progressions or at least to explain their practice.

Johannes

Only if you mean in the strict sense of the actual calculations that Placidus used because some of his math is relatively recent (algebra for instance post renaisance), but the idea of 1 day = 1 year was most certainly used in astrology. What about the key of Ptolemy in proportional semi-arc primary directions? (That is one day = one year) Ptolemy was a slightly older contemporary of Valens.

Otherwise, I think it is not safe to assume what the ancients knew. If we take the Bible as a case in point, it is rife with verses that are astrological in nature despite the whitewash by current church authorities. The 12 tribes of Israel, the dream of Joseph, 5 loaves and 2 fishes, Samson and Delilah, the throne of Judah, and the Levites as clergy and on and on and on...

Many astrologers seem to think that because an old book doesn't have the label "astrology" on it that it isn't worth looking into, or that what it says about astrology can't be trusted...

I agree with Kenneth that the method suggested by Valens in this one passage and nowhere else (to present knowledge) apparently didn't catch on. As for Ptolemy and the measure of directions, it isn't strictly speaking a day for a year (as suggested by Curtis); it is a degree of right ascension for a year. This is on p. 289 of the Robbins translation, p. 213 of H?bner's critical edition. (A degree for a year was the standard measure, used long before Ptolemy's time.) It is probably relevant here that the Greek word chronos, 'time', used by Ptolemy and others for 'equatorial degree', can also mean 'year'.

As for the original questions:

1. Is it correct at all to use the term secondary progressions, because: are there primiary directions? If not, why not say then: secondary directions?

Placidus did call them secondary directions (directiones secundariae).

To the best of my remembrance in the Latin text of Astrologia Gallica profections are called "progressiones" by Morin, thus primary progressions in English perhaps, opposite to the secondary progressions above?

Progressiones is an elastic term used to describe several different techniques. Morin rejected both profections and the methods of Placidus.

2. How do you rank the Riley-translation? Does Riley himself see his translation more like a test version? But is Possibly better then other end versions?

But who else did translate Vettius Valens, and how would you rank these? Which is the best in your opinion?

No translation is perfect, but I certainly prefer Riley's over the other two I have seen (into English by Schmidt and into German by Sch?nberger and Knobloch).

3. Can you give a quotation of Placidus, teaching progressions?
And if possible a link to the text in facsimile?!

If you mean the secondary directions, they are on p. 239 of Placidus' Physiomathematica, found here.

Martin Gansten wrote:As for Ptolemy and the measure of directions, it isn't strictly speaking a day for a year (as suggested by Curtis); it is a degree of right ascension for a year.

I wasn't trying to get technical, but the context was to suggest that the "day for a year" was not an accident; it was apparently in popular enough usage to be known widely outside of the field of astrology. There is a tendency to assume that if something isn't directly stated, that it didn't exist, but because we have probably lost more than 90% of what has been published on the subject (fires at the library at Alexandria for instance), the assumption that the fog of history covers nothing doesn't necessarily hold up.

thanks for the articulate response martin! responding to these kinds of questions are tedious, but you are very good with the details!

Martin writes:

No translation is perfect, but I certainly prefer Riley's over the other two I have seen (into English by Schmidt and into German by Sch?nberger and Knobloch).

I don't read German, but the two English translations are very different. Schmidt comes from St. John's, as I do, and the emphasis at that college is all on textual analysis without reference to cultural background and context, etc. It also tends to favor rational analysis, hence Schmidt's insistence that the Hellenistic astrological writings are "technical manuals pure and simple." To a St. John's student, that would be a logical conclusion, as that is what seems to appear on the page. Riley's translation seems much more "free," and therefore he is a somewhat easy read, though also very literal in his own way. I have found the detailed footnotes, sample charts, etc. in Schmidt to be valuable, and I do believe there is a proper place for linguistic analysis. I only wish that Riley, with his easy readability, had given us more footnotes and more scholarly apparatus.

I say: Read them all!

Kenneth Johnson wrote:Martin writes:

No translation is perfect, but I certainly prefer Riley's over the other two I have seen (into English by Schmidt and into German by Sch?nberger and Knobloch).

I don't read German, but the two English translations are very different. Schmidt comes from St. John's, as I do, and the emphasis at that college is all on textual analysis without reference to cultural background and context, etc. It also tends to favor rational analysis, hence Schmidt's insistence that the Hellenistic astrological writings are "technical manuals pure and simple." To a St. John's student, that would be a logical conclusion, as that is what seems to appear on the page. Riley's translation seems much more "free," and therefore he is a somewhat easy read, though also very literal in his own way. I have found the detailed footnotes, sample charts, etc. in Schmidt to be valuable, and I do believe there is a proper place for linguistic analysis. I only wish that Riley, with his easy readability, had given us more footnotes and more scholarly apparatus.

I say: Read them all!

Prof. Riley said that his translation was only preliminary and I remember Schmidt saying that he would change some things in his original translations (which is why he started a new translation series). This was to be expected and it was announced in 1993 that the Project Hindsight translations were to be preliminary after which a polished version would take over.

Curtis writes:

Prof. Riley said that his translation was only preliminary and I remember Schmidt saying that he would change some things in his original translations (which is why he started a new translation series). This was to be expected and it was announced in 1993 that the Project Hindsight translations were to be preliminary after which a polished version would take over.

I look forward to all such new ventures. The fact that different translators bring different perspectives to the material is a cause for celebration. Can one ever have too many translations of (for example) Pablo Neruda or Garcia Lorca? Of course not. Same with Hellenistic astrology. The more, the better.

it's implicit in the 70 Weeks of Astrology in Daniel ... the 70 weeks are 490 days which accounts for the 'prediction' of Daniel of Christ in 490 years (a Pluto/Neptune cycle) ...

Meaning it is an ancient Babylonian technique donchya think ... predating Ptolemy and Valens