Skyscript Astrology Forum

Other than being one of the factors of eminence, are there any other uses for this Lot?

*ahem*zoidsoft*ahem*

Hi Larxene,

This issue has come up on the forum before on this thread:

http://www.skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5490

It even features a post by Robert Schmidt!

Mark

Thank you, Mark.

Robert Schmidt said:

In any given chart, the Lot of Basis will be either the Lot of Eros or the Lot of Necessity, so Basis is actually not a separate lot at all.

But the formula for Eros is not the distance between Fortune and Spirit, but rather the distance between Spirit and Venus, according to several sources I read:

http://www.astrology-x-files.com/x-file ... parts.html
http://www.chrisbrennanastrologer.com/B ... ionale.pdf
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5523

Can anyone explain this?

Larxene wrote:

But the formula for Eros is not the distance between Fortune and Spirit, but rather the distance between Spirit and Venus, according to several sources I read:

Greenbaum explains it very well in her "The Daimon in Hellenistic astrology". They are two different traditions. She calls one "hermetic" (Paulus'one) and the other "egyptian" (Valens'one).

margherita

Larxene wrote: But the formula for Eros is not the distance between Fortune and Spirit, but rather the distance between Spirit and Venus, according to several sources I read:

http://www.astrology-x-files.com/x-file ... parts.html
http://www.chrisbrennanastrologer.com/B ... ionale.pdf
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5523

Can anyone explain this?

Like Margherita said, there are two different traditions that give different calculations for Eros and Necessity. The one that incorporates the planets Venus and Mercury into the equations comes from Paulus, and the one that only use Spirit and Fortune in the calculations comes from Valens and Firmicus. If you look at footnote 14 in my paper on the Lots you will see that I discussed it briefly there.

This issue has only really started to be dealt with recently because neither myself nor any of the Hindsight people knew what calculation Valens used until a few years ago, because Pingree bracketed the two sentences that outlined the calculations in Valens as being later insertions, and so they were not included in Schmidt's translation. Greenbaum pointed out at the Blast Astrology Conference back in 2008 that Pingree was wrong to bracket these sentences though, and it wasn't until that point that I started looking into the issue again, as did Schmidt. This is why you don't see a lot of discussion about this issue until recently though, at least with the people connected to Project Hindsight or drawing on Schmidt's translation of Valens. Of course, it has been clear for quite some time that Firmicus used an alternate calculation, and Crane deals with this a bit in his book, although at the time it was easier to write Firmicus off as just having this weird lot calculation that didn't involve Venus or Mercury. It was not so easy after it became clear that Valens was doing something like that as well, although it is still an open debate in terms of what the actual calculation for the Valens and Firmicus lots should be, and whether that set or the set presented by Paulus work better in practice.

Ah, so the reason my earlier sources use Paul's formulas is partly because of Pingree's modification. The other formulas were thought of as anomalies until recently.

Thanks, margerita and Chris.



Back to Basis, if we accept Schmidt's claims that:

- According to Rhetorius, the lord of Basis shows the foundation of the native's fortune.
- Eros concerns actions that we want to undertake but do not need to undertake.
- Necessity concerns the actions we need to undertake but would rather not have to do.
- Fortune may include the unintended consequences of our actions, whether those actions are carried out prior to incarnating or during our lives.

...then it seems that many of the things indicated by the position of Fortune can be attributed to the condition of the lord of Basis. That is, we can delineate whether the fortune or misfortune given by Fortune is largely due to Eros or Necessity.

What are your thoughts, guys?