Good morning,

Why wait another 500 tropical years? Let's do it now!

Required is a 12-member set of pronounceable mnemonics that include the 6, 4, 3 and 2 attributions of the signs of a tropical zodiac. One can take for example the first syllables of the Latin words for these attributes, since Latin is still the main base of many languages and of much astrological vocabulary in some others.

6 -> rising velocity combined with acceleration / deceleration (implied infinitesimal calculations in astrology?)

4 -> elements

3 -> modes

2 -> polarity

Since the 6's attributes each require two syllables, one has 12 5-syllable mnemonics.

Unless someone else be first, i hope and intend to propose a set, perhaps thus assuring immortality of my individual soul in the astrological hall of fame and gaining credits towards re-in-carnation as a sperm whale with a brain 5 times heavier than my present one.

Best regards,

lihin

Lihin
Good idea, and good luck!
What rulerships (or "associated planets", if you prefer) will you choose? That's what interests me, not the names, as that is what affects interpretation.
Will you respect a symmetry of rulerships corresponding to that of the rising times and day/night lengths (i.e. Summer solstice between the signs of the Moon and the Sun, Winter solstice between the two Saturn signs, and the others arranged accordingly, as if we were calling the the first tropical sign "Taurus" in the current system), or will you choose some other arrangement?
Your accumulation of merit will hinge on this.
Graham

Graham, I?m a beginner, and your post made me think. Thank you. In your original post, I see two questions. One involves your statement that the ?the [tropical] zodiac is considered to be arbitrary in terms of the constellations?, where I inserted ?tropical? where I think you meant that. The second involves the asymmetry between the tropical sign rulerships and the solstices. If I understand you correctly, you seem to say that since the invariant symmetry of antiscia is one elegant thing in tropical astrology, and if the mapping of zoidia to constellations is basically ?arbitrary?, why not set this mapping such that the rulerships are symmetric relative to the summer solstice? I think this is what you were saying.

I?d approach your first question with a question: Is it possible that the matching of zoidia to constellations was not "arbitrary", and was not entirely a one way street? Is it possible that the figures imagined in the sky actually could have come after some basic symbolic conception of the zoidia? At least in part? In other words, the all important seasons and agriculture are attended by observable things like an abundance of animals in the spring, and flooding in the rainy season. And this cycle begets explanatory legends and solar myths . And these beget the livestock-themed constellations we have in the spring, and the watery constellations of the near-eastern rainy season. Gavin White, in Babylonian Star Lore, seems to me to make this case, and postulates historical revisions in the constellations designed to compensate for outdated pictures in the sky that, due to precession, lose their connection to their season, the root of their symbolism. This book?s second appendix discusses this succinctly. The following two links (courtesy of NASA?s Astrophysics Data System) also discuss similar evolutions of projected astral pictures based on earthly experience, this time across cultures:

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full ... .108....9R
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full ... .108...79R

I?m new to this, so please don?t take my conjecture as being brash. But could it be that, after millenia, after the inherent seasonal meanings of the zoidia were ?baked in? to the constellations, individuals in the west kind of stopped looking to the stars so much, and turned to, say, the Julian calendar to see when to plant or harvest? No further revisions of the constellations took place. To compensate for this neglected constellational revision, we now just allow the constellations to slide out from under the zoidia wholesale. Sure, echoes of past constellations exist, like the stars zubeneschamali and zubenelgenubi, the northern and southern ?claws?, falling off of the scorpion and joining the scales (a long process to be sure, given the age of the latter constellation). But this trick, far from arbitrary, is what allows us to keep the symbolism of the zoidia appropriate to the season. I guess Mr. Lihin above was onto something ? updating the skies, to reflect our experiences on earth, is overdue. I think he was being tongue-in-cheek, but if he can muster the collective cultural wisdom and belt out new constellations - compact ideograms correlating the above of the heavens with the below we experience here on earth - I too would be enthusiastic!

Regarding the asymmetry of sign rulerships relative to the summer solstice, Deb Houlding?s quoting of Ptolemy, http://www.skyscript.co.uk/rulership.html,
describes ?heat and warmth? as the factor, not the solstices. I don?t believe I have the astronomic references some posters here have, so correct me if I?m off, but I went to the website www.holiday-weather.com (the first Google hit) and checked out Alexandria, Egypt, where I learned two things. First, you can?t ski in Alexandria. Second, it turns out that the temperature is bilaterally symmetric with highs in July and August, and lows in January and February. The axis of symmetry is indeed somewhere in the middle of each pair of months, consistent with the ?heat and warmth? logic of Ptolemy. The human body has a beautiful left-right symmetry on the outside but not the inside. The current tropical system has one such symmetry relative to the solstices, and another such symmetry relative to the heat experienced by people on earth. I?m not sure that the lack of complete coincidence between these two similarly structured symmetries reflects anything more inelegant than the hard facts of human experience which also shape the constellations.

Hello Phil
Thank you very much for this thoughtful and helpful post. Youv'e understood exactly what I was trying, perhaps not very clearly, to say, and raised several key points.

Is it possible that the figures imagined in the sky actually could have come after some basic symbolic conception of the zoidia? At least in part? In other words, the all important seasons and agriculture are attended by observable things like an abundance of animals in the spring, and flooding in the rainy season.

I think this is the most likely explanation for the identification and naming of the constellations (which of course don't exist per se). You quote Gavin White in this respect for Babylon; in the 70s, Fagan proposed a similar hypothesis for an Egyptian origin of the constellation names (in Astrological Origins) : e.g. the begginning of the Nile flooding in mid-July, corresponding with the heliacal rising of Sirius and with the acronychal (sunset) rising of the stars in what came to be Aquarius (or a full moon more or less in that constellation), an abundance of fish with the sunset rising of what came to be Pisces, a plague of insects when Scorpio rose in the evening, harvest time for Leo (the sickle), etc.

ke the stars zubeneschamali and zubenelgenubi, the northern and southern ?claws?, falling off of the scorpion and joining the scales (a long process to be sure, given the age of the latter constellation)

This is a very interesting point - perhaps a good example of zodiacal "slippage" to account for precession, as you suggest.

the temperature [in Alexandria] is bilaterally symmetric with highs in July and August, and lows in January and February. The axis of symmetry is indeed somewhere in the middle of each pair of months, consistent with the ?heat and warmth? logic of Ptolemy. The human body has a beautiful left-right symmetry on the outside but not the inside. The current tropical system has one such symmetry relative to the solstices, and another such symmetry relative to the heat experienced by people on earth. I?m not sure that the lack of complete coincidence between these two similarly structured symmetries reflects anything more inelegant than the hard facts of human experience which also shape the constellations.

This is the best explanation I've encountered of the apparent assymetry of the rulership arrangement of the tropical zodiac: it could represent a symmetry of subjectively experienced heat in Alexandria (and many other places in the northern hemisphere), rather than a symmetry of light around the solstice axis. This symmetry of heat is slightly skewed with respect to the solstice axis.
I'll try to check out Gavin White's work properly when I have time.
Thanks again.
Graham

The justification suggested by Phil (that the 0? Leo/0? Aquarius axis represents a symmetry of heat rather than of light) doesn't seem to quite fit what Ptolemy was saying. In Tetrabiblos I.10 (Robbins trans.):

Of the four seasons of the year, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, spring exceeds in moisture on account of its diffusion after the cold has passed and warmth is setting in; the summer, in heat, because of the nearness of the sun to the zenith; autumn more in dryness, because of the sucking up of the moisture during the hot season just past; and winter exceeds in cold, because the sun is farthest away from the zenith. For this reason, although there is no natural beginning of the zodiac, since it is a circle, they assume that the sign which begins with the vernal equinox, that of Aries, is the starting point of them all, making the excessive moisture of the spring the first part of the zodiac as though it were a living creature, and taking next in order the remaining seasons, because in all creatures the earliest ages, like the spring, have a larger share of moisture and are tender and still delicate. The second age, up to the prime of life, exceeds in heat, like summer; the third, which is now past the prime and on the verge of decline, has an excess of dryness, like autumn; and the last, which approaches dissolution, exceeds in its coldness, like winter.

Ptolemy says that the greatest heat is "because of the nearness of the sun to the zenith", the greatest cold "because the sun is farthest away from the zenith", and also associates Spring with moisture. I suppose you could say that Mars burns and creates moisture in the air, but Venus-Mercury-Moon would otherwise seem a good choice for the three months of spring (Mars' "burning" could thus precede the moisture of spring).
When Ptolemy says "they ['our predecessors'] assume that the sign which begins with the vernal equinox, that of Aries, is the starting point of them all, making the excessive moisture of the spring the first part of the zodiac" it sound like he's just talking about where the VP is sidereally in his day, that the sign containing the VP should be considered the 1st one.
Deborah Houlding (Understanding Planetary Dignity and Debility, http://www.skyscript.co.uk/rulership.html) implies that the logic for the symmetry of the rulerships around the 0? Leo /0? Aquarius axis is based on a symmetry firstly of light, only secondarily (and consequently) of heat (my italics):

In Book I of his Tetrabiblos Ptolemy gives a clear explanation of the reasons for the arrangement of sign rulerships, showing how they are based upon a symmetrical pattern that extends from the luminaries. As in most ancient symbolism, the pivotal point in the underlying philosophy is the relationship of the Sun to the Earth. Hence the distribution of planets to signs begins at the cusp between Cancer and Leo where the power of the Sun is greatest (at least in the northern hemisphere where astrology evolved).
"Since the most productive of heat and warmth are Cancer and Leo, they assigned these to the greatest and most powerful heavenly bodies, the luminaries, as houses. Leo, which is masculine, to the Sun and Cancer, which is feminine, to the Moon."

The five visible planets are then distributed between the ten remaining signs in such a way that each has a 'day house' in a masculine sign and a 'nocturnal house' in a feminine sign. (It is, of course, fitting that the luminaries rule only one sign each since the Sun loses its power in a feminine sign, just as the Moon loses its potency in masculine signs.)

And the diagram she provides says what I was trying to say much more clearly - that the most logical beginning for a permanent tropical zodiac would be Taurus, ruled by Venus. I should have posted it in the beginning: The VP was of course at the end of the constellation Aries and the beginning of Taurus (and the SS at the beginning of Leo, or between Cancer and Leo), in the early second millenium BCE, and it seems the earliest Babylonian star catalogues reflect this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_star_catalogues):

Among the most ancient constellations are those that marked the four cardinal points of the year in the Middle Bronze Age, i.e.
Taurus "The Bull", from GU4.AN.NA "The Steer of Heaven", marking vernal equinox
Leo "The Lion", from UR.GU.LA "The Lion", marking summer solstice
Scorpius "The Scorpion", from GIR.TAB "The Scorpion", marking autumn equinox
Capricornus "Goat-Horned", from SU?UR.MA? "The Goat-Fish", marking winter solstice. It is a mythological hybrid depicted on boundary stones from before 2000 BC as a symbol of Ea.
There are other constellation names which can be traced to Bronze Age origins, including Gemini "The Twins", from MA?.TAB.BA.GAL.GAL "The Great Twins", Cancer "The Crab", from AL.LUL "The Crayfish", among others.

Graham

hi graham,

i continue to enjoy and be confused by just what you are trying to arrive at here.

does one make the earth and the fact astrology seems to have been developed in the northern hemisphere the basis for any beginnings, or does one make it the sun? wanting to put emphasis on the lights sun/moon and heat - remember this is all symbolism as i understand it anyway- is different then acknowledging a starting point of the cycle based off growth, verses decay which is captured well with the spring and fall equinox in the northern hemi.

maybe you are just trying to arrive at why the rulerships were given the way they were.. if that is the case, i think you are making headway!

i was thinking right after i wrote this about the polarity of saturn and the moon, as opposed to saturn and sun. for me while saturn seems a natural indicator for death in so far as it rules the first part of winter, it is also a symbol for our ability to consider the future and make plans for the future. i think it is future oriented. janus the 2 headed god, or goddess looks back and forward into the past and into the future which i think fits with saturns rulership over the beginning of winter and the change to increasing day length after the longest night of the year represented by the winter solstice. the moon on the other hand is very much concerned with the past and marks the beginning of the decline of light at the beginning of the summer solstice. in this sense the moon is a good symbol for death as well in so far as it is the end of greater light and the beginning of greater darkness. all of this is northern hemisphere based, but i do like saturn and the moon as ruling over the beginning of winter and summer symbolically.

Graham,

I get what you?re saying! I think. Please let me know if I?m off: First, you essentially refer to Tetrabiblos I.17: ?Since of the twelve signs the most northern, which are closer than the others to our zenith and therefore most productive of heat and of warmth are Cancer and Leo, they assigned these to the greatest and most powerful heavenly bodies, that is, to the luminaries?? (which translation I grabbed just now on my laptop from the ebooks section of astrolibrary.org).
Then you interpret section I.10, as follows: spring is moist, moisture characterizes ?creatures in the earliest stages?, and therefore whatever constellation occurs in spring coincides with the ?first? sign in the zodiacal circle. Thus currently Aries is the ?first? sign. But, by the same logic, one Platonic month earlier Taurus was the ?first? sign. And, sure enough, this ?firstness? of Taurus is corroborated by earlier near eastern lists, as you have noted at the end of your post.
I think you then posit a constellation-based process at work here, because Cancer and Leo, at the time of Ptolemy?s writing, were certainly not the ?most northern? constellations. But they had been, one Platonic month earlier. Thus we find one (here ? and maybe more elsewhere) attribute of the signs (i.e. rulership) that has moved out from under the seasons in synchrony with the constellations ? with precession. I think this is your point.
But, I?d humbly add, focusing on the above only, there are inconsistencies in such a purely constellation-based interpretation of sign rulership. First, Ptolemy?s statement itself is problematic: It was never true that the season ?most productive of heat and warmth? correlated with the northernmost constellations of the ecliptic. That statement is false in all times ? all Platonic months ? and precession never corrects it. For it is common (and verifiable) knowledge that ?heat and warmth? occur in the northern hemisphere in July and August, not symmetrically about the summer solstice, regardless of which constellations fall there. So the question is: which half of the statement ?northernmost?most productive of heat and warmth? do we lean on and associate with Cancer and Leo? We can apparently only choose one.
Well, it is the association between temperature and the contemporaneously correct zoidia that is most clearly stated by Ptolemy ? both in the overtly stated ?heat and warmth? of Cancer and Leo and the ?cold and wintry? descriptions of Capricorn and Aquarius. Ptolemy appears to base his rulership assignments on correct observations of temperature ? of human experience ? in his region, correct in his time and all time, invariant relative to precession.
Reinforcing the up-to-date, as opposed to anachronistic, nature of Ptolemy?s observations and assignments is his definition of Aries as the first sign (as opposed to Taurus) in the same book. It is inconsistent for Ptolemy to switch from the current Platonic month in discussing Aries to the previous one in discussing Cancer and Leo. And in this same book (section 11) he defines what could be called the ?modes? of the zoidia in relation to his current era, not some previous Platonic month.
So I see your point, I think, and it is an interesting and thought provoking one. At worst my relative newness to astrology makes me na?ve; at best it gives me an open mind. I really puzzled over what you said. But, even taking a good bit of time to really ponder it (if I understood you) and give it its due, I still see a preponderance of references to the seasons in the above Ptolemaic descriptions of the zoidia. It seems futile to deny that Ptolemy?s zoidia are defined by these seasons and the human experiences they produce.
But Graham, though I come to this conclusion, I do so respectfully, and I find your thoughts and ?challenges? invaluable.

Phil

Hi Phil
Thanks for your reply. Yes, you put the other point of view very well - that Ptolemy wasn't simply taking what was sidereally the VP constellation in his epoch (Aries) as the first sign, but was carefully choosing the one most appropriate to represent, for all time, the beginning of the tropical zodiac, and that he chose this constellation (and it's already accepted ruler, Mars) not accordiing to the northen hemisphere solstices and equinoxes (axis of symmetry marking moments of maximum/minimum/equal light) but of the times of maximum/minimum heat in Alexandria (and in most of the Mediterranean region). I think that's the best rationalisation we can make to support Ptolemy and the Aries zodiac, but I think it's unlikely - I think he was probably just taking what was the VP constellation in his epoch, as he says in I.10.
When I started studying astrology here in France with Denis Labour?, who worked and has written on both tropical and sidereal astrology, he said that although sidereal (Indian) often seemed to give more accurate predictions, the tropical zodiac gave a deeply satisfying impression of working with light, with the cycle of light through the year. Deborah Houlding's remarks, which I quoted, seem to bear this out. Denis of course worked with Aries as the first tropical sign, but he told me that Fagan's view that Taurus (the VP constellation one Platonic month before, as you say) would be a better choice to start the tropical zodiac had been shared by some tropicalists.
I think it's really quite simple - do you prefer to have the rulership scheme aligned precisely with the tropical cycle of light, or approximately with the the hottest and coldest months in the Mediterranean. But now that the whole edifice of interpretation based on "Aries= the 30? following the VP" has been developed, and apparently found by many to be satisfactory, it's not of course going to change! I sometimes wonder if the multiplication of minor dignities etc, which enable a good astrologer to find just about anything in a chart retrospectively (and which sometimes seem like traditional equivalent of the multiplication of asteroids, hypotheticals, etc in modern astrology) wouldn't be so necessary if they'd got the zodiac (and the basic rulerships) right.
Just on a personal level, I've got more experience working sidereally, but I shall try to compare working sidereally with working tropically with the VP and solstices lined up to map Houlding's rulership diagram above (i.e. for Aries, read "Taurus"). I'll see how I get on.
Graham

Hi James
Now you're confusing me!

does one make the earth and the fact astrology seems to have been developed in the northern hemisphere the basis for any beginnings, or does one make it the sun? wanting to put emphasis on the lights sun/moon and heat - remember this is all symbolism as i understand it anyway- is different then acknowledging a starting point of the cycle based off growth, verses decay which is captured well with the spring and fall equinox in the northern hemi.

Since we're talking about the tropical zodiac, I'd say it's the Sun in relation to the Earth in the Northern hemisphere. We can acknowledge a cycle of growth and decay of light (the Sun's) in the Northern hemisphere. That's what Houlding (and others) implies, and I think she's right, so I think the rulership scheme should reflect that.

saturn [...] is also a symbol for our ability to consider the future and make plans for the future. i think it is future oriented. janus the 2 headed god, or goddess looks back and forward into the past and into the future which i think fits with saturns rulership over the beginning of winter and the change to increasing day length after the longest night of the year represented by the winter solstice.

Exactly, so it should be "looking both ways" to before and after the WS, as it would be if the WS was placed at 0? Aquarius, but as it isn't in the current scheme - it's only looking "up" to longer days.

the moon on the other hand is very much concerned with the past

So surely it should end a section of the zodiac (i.e. come before the solstice), not start a new one (by coming after it)?

in this sense the moon is a good symbol for death as well in so far as it is the end of greater light and the beginning of greater darkness

It could perhpas better represent death by ending a half-cycle. And it's immediately followed by the Sun, which must thus symbolise ever increasing darkness??
But I realise that my point of view is a bit like trying to persuade the Town Council of Stratford-upon-Avon that "Shakespeare" was in fact the Earl of Oxford - it's never going to work!
All the best
Graham

Graham,

I think now I?m the one who is misunderstood! I don?t think a derivation based on heat was the foundation of labeling Aries the first sign. In Tetrabiblos I.10 as you?ve quoted it, it seems that the ?newness? of spring is directly projected onto what should be the ?new beginning? of the zodiac. The constellation that happens to be there is imbued with ?newness? or ?firstness? because of this. The flow of symbolism in the quote mentioned is from season to zoidia to constellation. Even predating Ptolemy, there is more and more evidence of a season-based flow of symbolism in the ancient near east. So much so, that it seems the constellations themselves will break and re-form to keep appropriate to their seasons. That was what I was saying above.

I think the symmetrical rulership scheme we?re discussing is a totally separate ?axis? of symbolism, so to speak. I think the symbolic underpinnings of the poles of this axis are clearly stated by Ptolemy: ?heat and warmth? on the one end, and ?cold and wintry? on the other. The layout of sign rulers is in essence a classical, or Greek, system. Deb Houlding discusses this on the same page here on skyscript from which you took the illustration above. One will not find the current rulership structure in existence in a previous Platonic month. I believe it is not the case that the rulership structure illustrated in the figure you provided was centered on Cancer and Leo and the summer solstice in the Age of Taurus, and has shifted away from this solstice due to precession. For this layout, this order of rulers, did not exist in the Age of Taurus. Thus sign rulership is not some carryover from the past, out of synch due to precession. It?s invention was coeval with the Age of Aries.

And in this Age, when Ptolemy writes, he provides other, contemporaneous, properties of the signs. These are based on the signs? positions relative to the solstices, equinoxes, mid-seasons, and ends-of-seasons (See section I.11. I?m sticking with the astrolibrary.org/ebooks translation I mentioned before.) There is no Platonic month mixing going on. All zodiacal parameters ? the start of the zodiac, the seasonal properties of the zoidia, and the rulers of the zoidia ? are based on then-current seasonal underpinnings clearly stated by Ptolemy.

But I think I hear you ? temperature on its own isn?t 100% satisfying to me either in defining any particular astrological framework. I get it. I would direct you to the discussion on the sects of Mars and Saturn elsewhere in this forum. The conclusion of that thread demonstrated that there can be more than one ?axis? of symbolism in a certain realm of astrology.

I hope the above addressed your thoughts and that I'm not flying off-topic. And I'd add that I appreciate your point of view and any discussion or friendly "debate" that comes from it. This kind of thing - hearing new views and working with them, one way or the other - is what keeps astrology vital!

Phil

hi graham and paul,
i really appreciate your trying to understand me graham! pauls latest post here is something that i tend to readily identify with and want to thank paul for articulating what he has in this latest post. i think the ideas of rulership need to be kept separate from the idea of the seasons being the basis for the system and starting point to the tropical zodiac, as opposed to the heat of the sun. i am not as good with words and as focused on this as either you or paul, but i do believe paul has articulated my own feelings on this very well.

Good morning,

Methinks some of the content of this thread has recently been discussed in the thread called "Tropical Astrology-Seasonal or Non-Seasonal?" at this Forum:

http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic ... sc&start=0

The adoption of the tropical zodiac of the northern hemisphere, notably by Klaudios Ptolomaios, was indeed a conscious break with prior usage, an astrological paradigm shift.

Best regards,

lihin