Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Please note:  Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

The image?  That's the first card in The Sacred Geometry Oracle, which is hot off the press and on its way to stores and warehouses as I write these words. Card 1, The Unmarked Card, when upright indicates that the situation is wide open and you can make of it what you will; when reversed, it means that you don't have any way of knowing what's actually going on and you may want to back off and wait for more information before proceeding. The oak leaves on the sides of the image tell you that this card belongs to the first third of the oracle, which corresponds to Calas, the principle of solidity and materiality. 

 I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use the button above to access my online tip jar. If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain other gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

Astrology edge cases

[(Anonymous)]

I have a question about birth charts (it probably applies to any chart): I know a 30 minute period in which I was born. I don't think I can get more accurate information. At the start of the period, the Ascendant is just barely in one sign, and at the end of the period it is just barely in the other sign. One is Aquarius, the other Capricorn, so the meanings would be quite different. This also affects some other parts of the chart, like the Descendant, Midheaven and so on.

What is the usual way to deal with this problem? Would I just read the charts from both ends of the time period and pick the one that seems to fit better? Do they average out? Or is there some general rule about edge cases, that when something is right on the edge of two areas in the chart, it counts for both, or always for the clockwise one, or something else?

Re: Astrology edge cases

[booklover1973]

You could try to find out which ascendent (Capricornus or Aquarius) do fit better to the part of your personality which the Ascendent denotes. There is a whole branch of natal astrology concerned with rectifying birth charts, if the birth time is unknown or poorly known.

Re: Astrology edge cases

[ecosophia]

As u/booklover1973 says, rectification is the art of narrowing down an uncertain birth time. It's best done by a skilled astrologer; if you can find someone competent, they can usually sort things out promptly.

Re: Astrology edge cases

[abwatt]

There is a procedure in William Lilly, I think it's on p. 501, which he calls Trutine or Scrutiny of Hermes, for rectifying a birth chart. If I understand the procedure, it goes something like this:

1) Use the approximate time of the birth (e.g., morning or evening or night) to determine the Moon sign;
2) Count thirty-nine weeks earlier than that to find the date of conception (or use the date of conception from the parents... they might know it ... ahem ... intimately).
3) Make the chart for the day of conception, and put the Ascendant in the same sign that is the *Sign of the Moon in the birth chart*;
3a) There's a fudge factor here: it can be the sign of the Moon, or the sign opposite the Moon (if the person knows, for example, that they were born in the daytime or at night time... this allows for roughly 12 hours of difference to get the right time of day if it's known);
4) The sign that the Moon is in, in the conception chart, is the sign of the Ascendant in the birth chart.
5) The degree (and minute) of the Moon in the conception chart, is the degree and minute of the Ascendant in the birth chart.

Now... I have run this procedure for the charts of five or six of my friends with known birth times, and found that it accurately predicts the birth degree within about three degrees — that is, it's good for people with middle-of-sign births, but not people who are born very close to the change-over from one Ascendant sign to another. The Moon moves just a little more than 12° 53', or 12.88°, or 773' (minutes) per day — or about 32-33' minutes, half a degree, per hour. So, roughly 2/3s of the days in any month, the Moon will be in a particular sign, and only that particular sign on the day of your birth... there's a lot of wiggle room there. But when you make the Moon sign of your birth chart into the Ascendant of your conception sign, there's considerably less wiggle room, and you may be able to narrow your chart down to a specific 2-4° range using this method.

I have asked Christopher Warnock and some other astrologers about this method, with mixed results. The more traditional astrologers regard this as guesswork and adding additional layers of fudge-factors and wobble room to an already imprecise process when you have an accurate birth time. Others feel that it's nice to be in the right range of time, even if you can't get it exactly; and that it's nice to have a historically attested process to follow even if you know it yields only guesswork. And it's worth saying that I now have guidance from some astrologers and astrological enthusiasts that anything involving in vitro fertilization, or premature births, yield wildly inaccurate results.

William Lilly himself says that the method is better than chance and worse than an accurate birth time. This is what I've found in the (two) consultations I've done using this method.

I hope this helps.

Under stars,
Andrew Watt

Re: Astrology edge cases

[ecosophia]

Interesting. Yes, that's certainly an option.