25
Michael, if you are interested in the ancient origins of the thematic content of houses (vs. whether they are "good or bad") the following sources might be helpful:

The articles and monographs by Otto Neugebauer and his associates. Some of them, like Greek Horoscopes, are available as Google Books. He was a mathematician who became interested in the history of astronomy, and in this context he and colleagues interpreted-- and cast-- horoscopes in both the "literary" sources like Valens, but also in archaeological sources. Horoscopes that did not appear in the astrology texts of ancient times were preserved on papyrii and ostraca. I found his work on demotic horoscopes to be really interesting. (Demotic: a blend of the ancient Egyptian and Greek languages.)

The preserved and translated Greek sources. I think most of these are available via amazon.com, although the translations may be by classics scholars with little knowledge of astrology. Search: Firmicus Maternus, Dorotheus of Sidon, Rhetorius the Egyptian, Manilius. Vettius Valens Anthologies is available on line at: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/Vet ... entire.pdf

Unfortunately these books are not well-indexed, so you kind of have to hunt for the references to houses.

Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos is a major textbook on ancient astrology, but he doesn't seem to have cared for interpreting houses thematically. I believe he mentions only 3 of them.

Plutarch's Isis and Osiris is not about astrology, but I believe that this ancient work on Egyptian religion points clearly to several of the house origins. Then if you wish to look for potential connections from Greek mythology, see: www.theoi.com . It's an amazing treasure-trove of compiled textual sources from ancient Greek.

This line of reasoning doesn't specifically follow the angular-cadent-succedent plan of interpreting houses, but I think it does help explain why, for example, the 3rd house should be simultaneously the house of the goddess and the house of brothers; plus some of the "joys" of planets in particular houses. The ancient Egyptian mindset, from whence I believe house themes derived, wasn't looking for rational systematics. If they thought an idea or belief had value, they were likely to compile it, without concern as it whether it correlated with other beliefs on the same topic.

26
These are great hints, Waybread! :D

Neugebauer seems to be important in many respects. So I have ordered a hard copy of his Greek Horoscopes, at last.

Your various references to ancient sources relevant to the houses are useful, too. Thanks.
Plutarch's Isis and Osiris is not about astrology, but I believe that this ancient work on Egyptian religion points clearly to several of the house origins.
This made me wonder, could the house system perhaps have one of its roots in the myth of Isis and Osiris? Could, specifically, the lower hemisphere of the wheel represent the "underworld" (4th pertaining to death) and belong to Osiris? While the upper hemisphere (the Sun at the Midheaven) belongs to Horus?
The ancient Egyptian mindset, from whence I believe house themes derived, wasn't looking for rational systematics. If they thought an idea or belief had value, they were likely to compile it, without concern as it whether it correlated with other beliefs on the same topic.
Sounds pretty much like modern astrologers to me!

27
Michael, I think it does.

You might also be interested in the work of Joanne Conman-- she has a new book out and is sceptical about just about anything written about Egyptian astronomy and astrology to date. But she does offer a decent corrective against assuming too much from fragmentary data.

The "dwat" or 4th house was the judgment hall of Osiris. It was not specifically in the underworld (see Conman on this) but was clearly in an afterlife. Some cultural astronomers associated Osiris with the constellation Orion. Orion is basically below the ecliptic, but then the zodiac as the pathway of the sun seems more like a Mesopotamian idea. This should put the dwat in the north, however: and note that in a horoscope south is at the top of the chart.

We do find the sun/soul of the deceased going through a sequence of specific stages, often identified as temples. There aren't 12 of these so far as I know, but then the base-60 arithmetic system from which we find the number 12 so prominent was a Mesopotamian invention, as well.

There's more to the Egyptian mythology here that seems to match up with the thematic house contents, but I'll have to leave it for a later date.

28
Deb wrote:I'd like to see the discussion reframed, so that it can develop in a way that doesn't force it into an "either/or" issue, but just looks at the issues and explores the evidence available. Co-incidentally, I was in private discussion with Chris Brennan about a week ago, about his concerns that the ancient sources make it hard to overlook the natural association between Gemini and the third house. This may be something he wants to contribute to the thread. Currently, it's a bad time for me, but perhaps in a week or so I'll be able to be more active.

Thanks for mentioning this Deb! It is weird because we were just talking about this not long before this thread was started. I came across this discussion just now, and it looks like it may have already run its course, but I would like to share a few thoughts that I have on it because this is an issue that I was thinking about a lot a couple of months ago.

Earlier this year I was working on a new lecture for my intro to Hellenistic astrology course on the ruler of the Ascendant in each of the 12 houses, and one of the things that I spent a few months doing in preparation was a comprehensive literature review of the significations that the Hellenistic astrologers associated with each of the houses. At the same time I built up a database of a few hundred birth charts with AA data that I could use as examples for the ruler of the Ascendant in each of the houses in the lecture.

So, two things happened by late April when I started to wrap up this research and finalize my thoughts on the subject matter associated with the lecture. The first was that I was having a hard time ignoring the fact that there seemed to be some general theme of what I can only describe as Mercurial-type significations associated with 3rd house placements, which came up over and over again in chart examples, especially when important planets were placed there, such as the ruler of the Ascendant. Second, after I finished the exhaustive literature review I was surprised to find that there wasn't really any way to justify Mercurial-type significations as being associated with the 3rd house from a Hellenistic perspective, because I just couldn't find any evidence for much that was even remotely like that in the Hellenistic astrologers. I was kind of surprised by this, because I thought that there would have been something in the delineation material that would have at least intimated or hinted at some other meanings associated with the 3rd house that could perhaps be construed as being associated with Mercury. This would have explained why Mercurial significations started becoming associated with the 3rd in the early Medieval tradition. I found nothing though. The closest that I could really find was travel as being a common association with the third, except that this signification was associated with all four of the cadent houses in the Hellenistic tradition, so it is not necessarily being based on something connected with Mercury conceptually.

The end result of this was that I couldn't find any strong conceptual or textual way to associate the 3rd house with Mercurial things from a Hellenistic standpoint, but I started to get the sense that this really was something that showed up in the example charts, and I couldn't really deny it any longer. The question then becomes how could you associate the 3rd with Mercurial significations without having recourse to the so-called "natural house" associations, where Gemini is associated with the third house because it is the third sign measured from the vernal equinox. I cannot find any way to do this conceptually that feels fully satisfying without resorting to the natural house assignments, which has forced me to start to rethink whether or not I should entertain using those natural house assignments again in my practice, after rejecting them for the greater part of the last decade after I got into traditional astrology. Of course, I think that if I was to go in this direction that I would only incorporate the natural house significations in a much more limited way than they get used in modern astrology, since it seems like the concept has become overused and applied far too broadly in modern texts, to the detriment of any deeper understanding of the symbolic significance of the unique frame of reference that the houses represent.

At this point I started asking different traditional astrologers (Deb, Ben, Demetra) how they dealt with this issue, and how they justify any association of Mercurial significations with the 3rd house to themselves, at least conceptually. One of the issues that I ran into though is that Mercurial significations started creeping into the 3rd house early in the Medieval tradition, and then by the time of Lilly there are a number of them that are pretty well established. This is problematic to me because 1) I can't find any precedent for this in the Hellenistic tradition, and 2) I don't really see any way to justify this conceptually without having recourse to the natural house associations. Now, both Ben and Deb pointed out to me that the Moon gets associated with messengers in the Medieval tradition, and so they think that this is where the signification of messages comes from when it shows up in the 3rd house in the Medieval tradition, and then other related significations get derived from that. The problem I have with this explanation though is that some of these significations that get assigned to the Moon in the Medieval tradition (e.g. messages) were all associated with Mercury in the Hellenistic tradition, so there is some sort of major disconnect here between the significations that the Hellenistic and Medieval astrologers are associating with the Moon. It seems to me that it could have been that this happened because the 3rd house itself started getting assigned Mercurial significations, and then those significations started being applied to the Moon, as opposed to assuming that it was the other way around. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there is any way we could know which way it went from a historical standpoint.

The upshot of all of this is just that I think that we should be very careful about clearly defining exactly where we are deriving the significations of the houses from. I am very sympathetic to the tendency amongst traditional astrologers to reject the natural house significations altogether, and I think that that needs to be the starting point for any real discussion of where the original significations of the houses came from, since I have found no evidence of the natural house significations in the Hellenistic tradition. However, I'm starting to wonder if the natural house significations represent a creative development that was introduced later, and if we may need to accept some limited form of it in order to justify certain significations that we all seem to agree on already, such as for example Mercurial significations in association with the 3rd house, but also perhaps some others as well.

Obviously my thoughts on this issue are still very much in transition, so I apologize for this long, somewhat rambling post, but I wanted to type some of it out because it is an important issue that I've been wrestling with lately.

29
Hello Chris,

Personally, I don't really think this thread has already run its course ? rather, it was awaiting some fresh input. Thanks for providing that!

Despite my proposal to take closer looks at each of the rationales for the house meanings as summarized by Mark, I was somehow feeling blocked to carry on with this. I may come back to addressing some of the theories, but I feel that our discussion so far was somewhat missing the mark (no pun intended, Mark!). Most of all, it is not really my objective here to refute, or embrace, any of the traditional views on the houses. Long years of studying the esoteric sciences have convinced me that there are various valid ways to look at such matters, as a rule. In line with what I said in my introduction to this thread, I am more interested in exploring if/how the house/sign idea important in modern astrology can be reconciled with traditional astrology's stand on the matter. I was well aware of spotlighting a controversial topic, on a forum that emphasises the old approaches ? however, and this should be noted, as perceived by modern scholarship. This is to say that, were we to get on a time-machine and meet Valens for a delineation of our chart (preferably with an ephemeris for the next two-thousand years in our pocket), we may be quite surprised how he would go about his business!

So I really appreciate your courage to share your personal observations on this concept. I agree with you that the ?natural houses view? should not be used to excuse vague and blurred chart delineations in any way. This is exactly why I am pursuing a clearer definition of the levels and modes of expression that are to be ascribed to the signs, and to the houses, respectively. Not that a certain degree of blending could, or would be desired to be, avoided in the context of so-called modern astrology - which emphasises holistically interweaving the elements of the chart, due to its inspiration by people like Dane Rudhyar and Jean-Baptiste Morin. But it goes without saying that, where the ?alphabetical? approach is overstretched, it does not serve the quality of the information that can be extracted, and actually often is rather meant to ?compensate? for a lack of knowledge on the astrologer's part. But, on the other hand, denying the validity of the houses/signs analogy altogether seems to me throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

Perhaps as a base for further discussion, I will present some of my own thoughts and observations on the topic. Sorry if my paragraphs sometimes overlap each other a little in their meaning. :lol: Let's look at the matter from a few different sides:

Foundational Philosophy

In my opinion (and I'm not alone), Astrology is one of the ancient Hermetic sciences whose prime axiom has always been: ?As above, so below?. The zodiac is a measure of a celestial body's cosmic motion, most prominently of the revolution of the Sun around the Earth (as geocentrically observed). The wheel of the houses, on the other hand, measures their diurnal revolution due to our planet's rotation. Both are circles divided into twelve sectors. At least in the Placidus House System, houses are representing planetary double-hours; this directly relates to the way signs are measuring months, but the other systems are not far removed from this, either. In light of this analogy between the zodiac and the houses, it seems reasonable to assume that the two wheels are also alike in other ways. Also the planets are expressing this principle of ?twelveness? - whether in an extended modern scheme, or in the traditional scheme by assigning each of them to a diurnal as well as to a nocturnal domicile (except the Luminaries, of course, which are representing the polarity of day and night by themselves).

I am really not sure how you would explain philosophically why the wheel of the houses is to be seen as conceptually separate from this.

Structure

0? Aries and 0? Libra are the pivotal points between the ?dark? and the ?bright? halves of the Sun's annual circle. In analogy, the 1st and 7th house cusps mark the line between the diurnal and the nocturnal hemispheres of the chart. I think I have read somewhere that this analogy doesn't really hold true - since 0? Capricorn represents the culmination of darkness whereas the 10th house cusp has the Sun at his most prominent place. But such a critic is neglecting that even the meaning of the signs cannot in truth be deduced from their seasonal associations, which are in reverse on the Southern hemisphere. What remains undisputed among Tropical astrologers worldwide is the fact that the Equinoxes and Solstices are the key markers in the twelve-fold division of the ecliptic, much like the Angles in the wheel of the houses.

Empirical evidence from counselling practice

This kind of consideration includes some subjectivity, so it may not be very convincing to some... at least, until they try to make their own observations! In the way Chris started reconsidering the concept because of what his astrological training let him perceive in others - notwithstanding the belief he started out with.

Astrologers like Stephen Arroyo found the houses to clearly mirror the signs in their own practical experience. Like those astrologers, I have myself observed that, i.e., folks with an emphasis on the 4th house have something definitely Cancerean about them, or with a stellium in 6th something strongly reminiscent of Virgo, etc. However, these traits don't show themselves quite as readily as the signs. To illustrate, I have been able to guess somebody's Sun position as well as other main factors in regards to their zodiacal positions often (I am sure many of you have done this, too) but I never even tried to guess their house positions! Houses don't radiate the basic characteristics the way signs do. Perhaps it could be said that planets placed in a certain house will identify with its theme, however, and this acts back on, and cannot fully be separated from, the basic personality. I don't know how to formulate this more comprehensively, at the moment...

Typical activities attributed both to the houses and to the signs

A more objective empirical approach would be to consider activities and professions typical for the various signs in light of the corresponding houses. For example, the 2nd house refers to one's finances ? whereas Taurus characters are known to be typically involved with finance professionally (i.e. as bankers9. They are also reputed to look after their own purse very well!

Another example... The sixth house traditionally represents health issues. Could it be pure incidence that Virgo is prominent in so many a medical practitioner's chart?

Or take the 12th house and Pisces. Activities in quite isolated and spartan places like hospitals, monasteries, and third-world countries... these things resonate quite well with this sign.

I may elaborate my examples later.

Astromedical experience

That the signs and their corresponding houses can signify the same parts of the body is old knowledge in medical astrology, or iatro-mathematics. Al-Kindi has this already, as Paul informed us earlier on this thread.

As a note, I have worked with this system extensively myself during a 6 years long association with a medical doctor, and I can only testify that both the signs and the houses are representing affected organs etc. extremely accurately in so many charts.

The wheel of the houses has to do with the scenery of our experienced reality, in which our body is our first reference. Thus ? if we assume houses to be analogous to signs ? it's not surprising that the body would express the houses quite definitely, and in accordance with their zodiacal attributions.

Historical predecessors

This whole concept is really not new, and I am not quite sure why many traditionalists would get so worked up over it on historical grounds. As we know from the foregoing discussion on this thread, we can find fairly early astrologers using it more or less explicitly. If it goes all the way back to Hellenistic times remains to be seen, however.

But how crucial is this, anyway? If astrologers were supposed to neglect innovations in their art, we would still be doing our delineations based on nothing but ancient Mesopotamian practice. No more inconvenient house debates, no more obnoxious uncertainties about aspects... Simply: Retour ? la nature! :D

Symbolical correspondences

This is an area I haven't thought about much much yet. Even though, for example, the associations between 3rd/brothers/Gemini, and 7th/(different kinds of) partners/Libra seem quite obvious. Maybe somebody else wants to contribute something on this (Waybread, perhaps?).

Best,
Michael

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Chris Brennan wrote:
One of the issues that I ran into though is that Mercurial significations started creeping into the 3rd house early in the Medieval tradition, and then by the time of Lilly there are a number of them that are pretty well established. This is problematic to me because 1) I can't find any precedent for this in the Hellenistic tradition, and 2) I don't really see any way to justify this conceptually without having recourse to the natural house associations.
There is another way of approaching this issue Chris. As I have suggested several times now on Skyscript the Thema Mundi may have been a contributory influence on the early meanings of the houses. In the Thema mundi the 3rd house is mercurial too although in this instance its the sign of Virgo not Gemini. Note how scathing Valens comments are on the sign of Aquarius in his Anthology. In part this is no doubt due to its association with the greater malefic Saturn. However, I do wonder if this might not also relate to its location as the 8th place of the Thema Mundi.

I dont suggest its always a perfect fit. Sagittarius on the 6th is probably the the most counter-intuitive association. However, Pisces ruling the 9th is house is very thematic. It certainly fits much better than the natural zodiac sequence from an ancient perspective with Pisces associated with the 12th house.

Chris Brennan wrote:
Now, both Ben and Deb pointed out to me that the Moon gets associated with messengers in the Medieval tradition, and so they think that this is where the signification of messages comes from when it shows up in the 3rd house in the Medieval tradition, and then other related significations get derived from that. The problem I have with this explanation though is that some of these significations that get assigned to the Moon in the Medieval tradition (e.g. messages) were all associated with Mercury in the Hellenistic tradition, so there is some sort of major disconnect here between the significations that the Hellenistic and Medieval astrologers are associating with the Moon.
I wonder if its correct that the Moon gets all its association as a messenger in the medieval tradition? How then do you explain the ancients assigning the 3rd as the Joy of the Moon? In the Egyptian tradition the Moon god Thoth is the God associated with writing similar to the Greek Hermes. Of course we dont have a perfect connection here. Thoth is a male god while the 3rd is traditionally the house of the Goddess. Still, in ancient Alexandria there was clearly a high degree of religious syncretism from a very early stage.

In some of the demotic horoscopes researched by Micah Ross it appears the 10th house rather than the 3rd seems to have been regarded as the house of the Goddess. So perhaps we have evidence of a syncretic astrological development here combining Egyptian and Greek ideas?

In summary, the 3rd house has a mixture of mercurial and lunar associations right from the start in ancient astrology stemming from the Thema Mundi and planetary joy of the Moon.

Some ideas to ponder anyway....

Mark
As thou conversest with the heavens, so instruct and inform thy minde according to the image of Divinity William Lilly

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Mark wrote: There is another way of approaching this issue Chris. As I have pointed out several times now on Skyscript the Thema Mundi may have been a contributory influence on the early meanings of the houses. In the Thema mundi the 3rd house is mercurial too although in this instance its the sign of Virgo not Gemini.

I dont suggest its always a perfect fit. Sagittarius on the 6th is probably the the most counter-intuitive association. However, Pisces ruling the 9th is house is very thematic. It certainly fits much better than the natural zodiac sequence from an an ancient perspective with Pisces associated with the 12th house.

I explored this possibility at one point when I was trying to figure out the rationale for the significations of the Octatopos, and while it does seem like some of the assignments might make sense, it didn't seem to be conceptually consistent enough for me to fully adopt it as a secondary way of deriving the significations of the houses. Clearly some of the assignments would make a bit of sense, like association the Moon/Cancer with the 1st, both of which signify the body, or associating the Sun/Leo with the 2nd, and the Sun's associations with gold. But like you said, it seems like a bit of a stretch when we come to Sagittarius and the 6th, unless there are some significations that are relevant there that are not clear at first glance.
Mark wrote: I wonder if its correct that the Moon gets all its association as a messenger in the medieval tradition? How then do you explain the ancients assigning the 3rd as the Joy of the Moon? In the Egyptian tradition the Moon god Thoth is the God associated with writing similar to the Greek Hermes. Of course we dont have a perfect connection here. Thoth is a male god while the 3rd is traditionally the house of the Goddess. Still, in ancient Alexandria there was clearly a high degree of religious syncretism from a very early stage.

I don't fully understand your two questions here. Could you explain what you mean?

I had considered the fact that Thoth was originally a Moon god in Egyptian religion, and whether this might be an explanatory rationale for how what we might consider Mercurial significations started showing up in the 3rd house, and others such as Deb and Demetra have made this point as well. It is a pretty natural point to make. I have a couple of problems with it that make me hesitant to adopt it as a justification for those 3rd house significations though:

The first is that, as I said earlier, the Mercurial significations that we sometimes associate with the third house really don't start showing up until the early Medieval tradition with the first Arabic authors, and they are entirely missing from the Hellenistic tradition, even as late as Rhetorius at the very end of the tradition. So, even if we were to have recourse to this idea that Thoth was originally a Moon god, and so perhaps some of the significations associated with Thoth like writing could have been associated with the 3rd house early in the tradition, we have to contend with the fact that there don't really appear to be any associations between writing and other such things with the 3rd house until after the Hellenistic tradition. Basically, we don't have any evidence that the Hellenistic astrologers took any of those significations from Thoth and applied them to the 3rd. The best case scenario is that maybe we could assume that some astrologers could have made that connection, but this might be problematic since we are lacking any evidence for it, despite the survival of several different delineation texts and treatments of the significations of the houses from the Hellenistic tradition.

The second issue I have with using Thoth's association with the Moon in order to justify Mercurial significations with the 3rd house is that this would require us to basically ignore the way that the Hellenistic astrologers themselves described and conceptualized the Moon's significations. It seems pretty clear to me that by the Hellenistic period Thoth became firmly associated with Mercury, not the Moon, and they don't really associate the Moon with any Mercurial significations. So, having recourse to Thoth would require us to ignore what Valens and Teucer/Rhetorius give as significations for the Moon, and instead import some earlier scheme from prior to the Hellenistic period, before the houses even existed (probably). There is something about that that is a bit problematic to me, because it would mean that we are going back into a much earlier pre-Hellenistic religious tradition in order to justify significations that only appear to have started to become associated with the 3rd house much later, around the 8th century CE.

Ultimately, as far as I can tell we don't really know why the early Medieval astrologers started associating some of these Mercurial significations with the 3rd house. I can't find any references to the natural house scheme at this point in the Medieval tradition (c. 8th through 12th centuries), so I'm not even necessarily saying that that is where those significations originally came from. For all we know it could have come from some other source, like derivative houses. For example, one of the significations that gets added to the 3rd house in the Medieval tradition is "legates". On p. 99 of the first volume of his translation of Bonatti Ben originally speculated in a footnote that this signification must be derived from the fact that the 3rd is the 6th from the 10th, and thus it signifies servants of the King, which would include people like legates or messengers. By extension this may be where the other signification of "messages" in the 3rd house comes from, which shows up right next to legates in Bonatti. I'm not necessarily sure that this is still where Ben thinks that these significations came from at this point in time, but my point is that some of the significations may have developed through alternate, somewhat contrived routes. This is a bit problematic conceptually though, because it provides kind of a weak conceptual rationale for some of the other Mercurial-type significations that get associated with the 3rd house as the tradition progresses. This is where I think that we need to do some work in figuring out a consistent conceptual rationale to use if we are going to retain these Mercurial significations in association with the 3rd house.

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Mark wrote:Mark wrote:
I'm starting to wonder if the natural house significations represent a creative development that was introduced later, and if we may need to accept some limited form of it in order to justify certain significations that we all seem to agree on already, such as for example Mercurial significations in association with the 3rd house, but also perhaps some others as well.
No No No Chris! Dont do it. To quote Yoda

''If once you start down the dark path , forever will it dominate your destiny'':-sk

Mark

Ha. Trust me, I don't take that suggestion about possibly entertaining the natural house associations lightly, and it would be a pretty big change in my approach after 10 years of trying to rebuild my understanding of the significaitons of the houses from the ground up based only on what I could find in Hellenistic tradition, or that could be derived from a clear conceptual or symbolic rationale that did not have to do with the natural house associations. And as you can see from my last post, I've tried very hard to find alternate reasons to justify certain significations like the Mercurial associations with the 3rd, but there are always these nagging conceptual issues that make it so that I haven't really been able to find an alternate rationale that seems fully satisfying yet. I'm still open to entertaining other rationales, and I have not really started moving in the direction of using the natural house significations again yet, but I'm entertaining the possibility that that may be necessary in the absence of a better alternative.

33
Thus spake Yoda:
Not is mercury the only communicator..transmits the influence the moon too.Attached is the link to the file Deb's
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/considerations.pdf

Even from Lilly's considerations:
Have special regard to the strength and debility of the Moon, and it?s far better the Lord of the ascendant be unfortunate than she, for she brings unto us the strength and virtue of all the other Planets, and of one Planet to another.
So, Moon and Mercury do fight for a place in the transmission department.If you give cancer the 1st place in Thema mundi, then, Moon is the communicator for the whole schema any way.

PD

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Hello all,

I think perhaps looking at both the "natural" zodiac and the scheme of the Thema Mundi would be a more interesting, if perhaps more complicated, fit. In either set-up, Mercury would always manage the third. The only other scenario where that happens is the 9th, where it's always Jupiter. Looking that the 7th is interesting, as it gives both Venus and Saturn, the 7th being both marriage and exile.
Mark wrote:Sagittarius on the 6th is probably the the most counter-intuitive association.
Why so? In the ancient world of the Hellenes, disease was usually thought to be the result of miasma, which while literally "pollution", is better seen as an excess of living "matter". Excessive life, sounds like Jupiter. Also, the usual depiction of Sagittarius is IMO Chiron.

Also, isn't Khonsu more the Moon god? Tehuti has that aspect, but I thought that was a very ancient association and not very emphasized in later periods.
Gabe

35
Hello every advanced,

Very splendid discussion!

And could I say I just discussed the similar topic with some friends in China yesterday ?

I am inclined to the meaning of house being associated with the daily motion of the Sun ,and the tropical signs with the annual motion of the Sun.

In our dear Deb?s The Houses - Temples of the Sky book she has made a lot of textual criticism or research , I think it is a very good reference book.

Have fun

Ming

36
Hi Ming,

Thanks for joining in! :D

Isn't it funny how sometimes a certain topic seems to be "in the ether"? Well, as astrologers, we shouldn't be so surprised, I suppose.

I agree that the motion of the Sun is the common denominator between the two wheels.

I also agree with you on Deb's book, it contains a lot of good information (I read it meanwhile).

Have fun, too!

Michael