Charles Carter's Poli Equatorial House System

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Hi there - forum members may be interested in a blog posting I have written about Charles Carter's Poli Equatorial house system. This is an unjustly neglected system, devised by Carter, the great English astrologer. Its neglect is probably due to the fact that it does not appear in any of the mainstream software packages, with the exception of the cloud-based astroapp.

http://www.exeterastrologygroup.org.uk/ ... ystem.html

Comments are welcome.

Many thanks. Ed
"...the motions that are akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe."

Plato, Timaeus, 90.

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You might want to contact Alois Triendl of astro.com and let him know you want this system. Most programmers get their house systems from the Swiss Ephemeris dll. While most systems are easy to program, it is much nicer to have all the code in one place. I was probably the first to set up the whole sign house system which is also trivially easy to do (anyone who drew sign boundaries could claim to have the whole sign house system though), but it was not in the Swiss Ephemeris until its use became popular.

If you think of meanings as semantic fields (as suggested by Schmidt) then the reality is that meanings overlap and span several houses. While it looks sophisticated to include all of these different systems, being excessively Virgo about house lines misses the point. For instance, the home is typically assigned the 4th house, but the 3rd house and 5th house are connected to it. Children are thought connected to the home (5th) and neighbors are just outside the home (3rd). Neighbors are sometimes invited to "home" and children are typically in the home. Notice that the diurnal motion tends to bring children back into the home, but kick neighbors out after a certain amount of time. But they are all part of that overall semantic field. Hellenistic sources assign "children" to the 4th, 5th, 10th and 11th. A word as a meaning doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a given house.

As a programmer though, if a sufficient number of people want it, I will include it.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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zoidsoft wrote:You might want to contact Alois Triendl of astro.com and let him know you want this system. Most programmers get their house systems from the Swiss Ephemeris dll.
Good timing :)
Actually, Alois Triendl has already contacted me about that earlier last month. AstroApp has 55 house systems, more than any other program out there. The current plan is to open-source some of the unique ones.
Ed, I sent you an email about this before the New Year and also last week. If you didn't get it, just please ping me for details if you're interested in pursuing this further. From what I see so far this system is not being used much but I think it has its merits.

thanks
gene

Thanks for your replies

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Hi Gene and Curtis - thanks for your interest in this subject. I'd be very happy to work with Swiss Ephemeris to get the poli equatorial system into the hands of programmers. I'll contact Gene by email to see what we need to do.

I'm a rank beginner at programming, but I was able to devise a crude BASIC program to get poli equatorial cusps based on a given ascendant. I want to rewrite it so that it calculates on sidereal time. The underpinning theory was easy to work out and I guess you guys could probably devise the code in a few minutes. It took me weeks!! because programming just goes over my head.

In fact, people that can program and do astrology confound me - I've always assumed that I can't program because I can do astrology. The mental skills seem to be so different. However, I did find it very satisfying to get even a simple program running. It's good for improving one's problem solving skills....

Carter's system is a very interesting one, and deserves to be better known, partly out of respect to a great astrologer, but also because the system stands on its own merits.

I've used it a lot and it works well.

Thanks again - your interest is much appreciated. Ed
"...the motions that are akin to the divine in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe."

Plato, Timaeus, 90.

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gene_v wrote:
zoidsoft wrote:You might want to contact Alois Triendl of astro.com and let him know you want this system. Most programmers get their house systems from the Swiss Ephemeris dll.
Good timing :)
Actually, Alois Triendl has already contacted me about that earlier last month. AstroApp has 55 house systems, more than any other program out there. The current plan is to open-source some of the unique ones.
I think there are only about 20-25 house systems in existence counting from the Hellenistic era. Would you care to give a full list with sources for each house system?
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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Hi Curtis,

I've been collecting those for quite some time and I don't have all the sources handy at the moment. Several came from user requests (such as Carter's), quite a few are equal houses from various points.
There are many sources in languages other than English. For example, at least 2 of my systems came from publications in French (8-house systems), one (APC) came from Dutch. The Dutch one is now included in the swiss ephemeris package.
Generally, a good place to start would be Michael Munkasey's article on house division. It's mentioned here: http://www.skyscript.co.uk/houprob4.html but looks like the link is broken. I guess you can just google it, hopefully it still exists somewhere. He lists most popular house systems such as Placidus and Koch along with several exotic ones. I'd just suggest to do your own math as formulas there are riddled with errors. At least it was easier and faster for me to do all the calculations from scratch.

Thanks,
Gene

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Hi Gene,

I posted about house systems over here which is where we are continuing the discussion:

http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8641

The problem is making sure that what is defined is actually a unique house system. You might have a lot of duplication in your work if you have just taken the math algorithms from different sources when they themselves might not have been aware that they were duplicating another system. I studied a lot of this stuff when Alex Harvey was posting online but turned my attention elsewhere by the late 90's. So far I only have about 30 unique systems and am not sure that amongst these that there isn't duplication.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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zoidsoft wrote:Hi Gene,

I posted about house systems over here which is where we are continuing the discussion:

http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8641

The problem is making sure that what is defined is actually a unique house system.
This is a very valid point. Technically, you can always brute-force it by calculating and comparing all house cusps for all house systems for a set of charts. I had to reject quite a few systems that failed this test (by producing house cusps identical to existing systems). But this is just the first step. There can be errors in implementation that would result in house cusps differences and most importantly - errors in tradition transmission. If anything gets lost in translation, the resulting house system may end up producing unique house cusps while still being identical to some existing version of that system. In a way, that would be similar to Alcabitius house system variations - the ideas behind both of them are the same, the projection methods are slightly different. At the end of the day, it's up to astrologers to decide what to use.
Anyway, I'm going to follow your other thread to avoid duplicating the posts.

thanks
Gene

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gene_v wrote:This is a very valid point. Technically, you can always brute-force it by calculating and comparing all house cusps for all house systems for a set of charts. I had to reject quite a few systems that failed this test (by producing house cusps identical to existing systems). But this is just the first step. There can be errors in implementation that would result in house cusps differences and most importantly - errors in tradition transmission.
So I checked your website and you're saying that there's at least 56 unique systems and that you checked to see that they all generate unique cusps (at least part of the time)? Or are you using a different rationale for counting house systems? (See my rationale on the other thread). It would make better sense if you would just list the names of the 56 house systems on your website, but I don't see them listed by name. Your site seems to have a habit of listing the count and not what types you've implemented (for instance you say that there are 7 systems of bounds), but serious students of astrology need to know what systems there are.
Curtis Manwaring
Zoidiasoft Technologies, LLC

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So I checked your website and you're saying that there's at least 56 unique systems and that you checked to see that they all generate unique cusps (at least part of the time)?


Yes, in most cases this is at least an entry criterion for a system to be considered as unique.
It would make better sense if you would just list the names of the 56 house systems on your website, but I don't see them listed by name. Your site seems to have a habit of listing the count and not what types you've implemented (for instance you say that there are 7 systems of bounds), but serious students of astrology need to know what systems there are.
All the details are actually listed in the Features section. I don't describe the complete sets in the Overview as it would be impractical to squeeze in thousands of features on a single page.

The list of house systems can be found here: https://astroapp.com/main-features/calculations (under the House Systems tab).
Please note that a few systems such as Gauquelin sectors, equal house systems, or recently added sidereal / clockwise systems are still missing from the list but I think it's representative enough.

And the list of bounds systems can be found under the Dignities/Qualities tab here: https://astroapp.com/main-features/medieval-tradition

thanks,
Gene