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2nd century BCE – 6th century CE · Alexandria, and the Greek-speaking Mediterranean

Hellenistic

Reads a chart as a shape: which planets can see each other, which are awake by day or by night, which arrived in a place that welcomes them. Concrete, fatalistic in register, and far more interested in the condition of a planet than in its symbolism.

Who wrote it down

The authors are long out of copyright. Almost every English text of them is not — a modern translation is a living work of scholarship owned by its translator. So Jade paraphrases and names the chapter, and quotes directly only where an English text is itself in the public domain. Two of the nineteen sources are.

  • Claudius Ptolemy

    c. 100 – c. 170 CE

    Τετράβιβλος · Greek

    The text that made astrology defensible to natural philosophers, and the one every later tradition argues with.

    quotable in English

  • Vettius Valens

    c. 120 – c. 175 CE

    Ἀνθολογίαι · Greek

    A working astrologer rather than a theorist — over a hundred worked charts, and the bluntest surviving Hellenistic voice.

    paraphrase only

  • Dorotheus of Sidon

    1st century CE

    Carmen Astrologicum · Greek, surviving through Arabic

    Written in verse, transmitted through Persian and Arabic, and the direct ancestor of most medieval technique.

    paraphrase only

  • Julius Firmicus Maternus

    c. 334 – 337 CE

    Matheseos Libri VIII · Latin

    The fullest Latin statement of Hellenistic doctrine, and unusually explicit about what a placement is like to live with.

    paraphrase only

What each planet meant

Three answers for each: what this tradition took the planet to be, what it takes the planet to do, and what it makes of somebody born with it strongly placed. The third is the one that differs most between traditions, and the one a reading is built from.

  • Sun

    is
    The light of the day sect and the mind’s ruling part — not a planet among planets but the thing the others are arranged around.
    does
    Exposes. Whatever it draws near becomes visible and loses the protection of not being noticed.
    in a nativity
    Born by day it governs the chart and a life arranges itself around being seen; born by night it is a guest in the other sect’s territory, and recognition tends to arrive later and from a direction the person never cultivated.

  • Moon

    is
    The body’s own clock and the fastest thing in the chart — the part of a person that responds before it decides.
    does
    Carries. It gathers the condition of whatever it has just left and delivers it to whatever it meets next.
    in a nativity
    The night sect’s leader, and the nativity’s second beginning — Valens reads a life forward from the Moon rather than from the rising sign, so what somebody does under pressure is read here and not from how they present.

  • Saturn

    is
    The outermost visible planet, cold and dry, of the day sect — the boundary of the world as the tradition could see it.
    does
    Slows and constrains. It takes time away from things and gives weight in exchange.
    in a nativity
    The day sect’s malefic, least dangerous in a day chart and most in a night one. What it governs is not hardship but duration — whatever it touches is slow to arrive and slow to leave.

  • Jupiter

    is
    The greater benefic and the day sect’s best piece — temperate where Saturn is cold and Mars is hot, and therefore the one that makes room.
    does
    Enlarges. It does not improve what it touches; it makes more of it.
    in a nativity
    The day sect’s benefic, and the tradition is blunt that it protects rather than provides: it keeps a life from narrowing, which is a slower gift than luck and a more durable one.

  • Mars

    is
    The hot, dry, cutting one — the night sect’s malefic, and worst placed when the chart is a day chart and it has no ally.
    does
    Separates. It gets things apart from each other, which is destruction or surgery depending entirely on whether the thing needed separating.
    in a nativity
    Tolerable in a night chart and difficult in a day one, which is the tradition’s way of saying that the same heat is a tool or a liability depending on whether there is anything worth pointing it at.

  • Venus

    is
    The lesser benefic, of the night sect, governing what is pleasant and what draws people toward each other.
    does
    Attracts. It brings things into relation on the strength of wanting rather than of reasoning.
    in a nativity
    Of the night sect, and read for what somebody is drawn towards rather than what they secure. Strong, a life accumulates alliances; strained, the person keeps choosing the arrangement over its terms.

  • Mercury

    is
    Neither day nor night in itself, taking the sect of whichever light it rises or sets with — the most conditional planet in the system.
    does
    Joins. It puts things next to each other and finds the relation, which is thought when it works and rationalisation when it does not.
    in a nativity
    Rising ahead of the Sun it reasons before events; setting after it, the person understands things afterwards and understands them better. Neither is the superior placement — they are two different relationships to time.

No entry here for Rāhu and Ketu. The lunar nodes are central to Jyotiṣa and present in the Arabic material, and the Greek and Latin traditions have no developed doctrine of them — so Jade prints nothing rather than inventing one.