Ep. 205 Transcript: The Master of the Nativity

The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 205, titled:

The Master of the Nativity

With Chris Brennan and guest Leisa Schaim

Episode originally released on May 17, 2019

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by the Transcription Team

Transcription released August 16th, 2024

Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This is episode 205, and in this episode we’re going to be talking about the Master of the Nativity. Joining me today is Leisa Schaim. Hey, Leisa.

LEISA SCHAIM: Hey, Chris.

CB: And when are we starting this? So it’s Monday, May 13th, 2019, starting at approximately 10:36?

LS: Sounds about right.

CB: P.m. It’s a little late. We had a long setup process today but we are determined to get this in, because this is an important episode and it’s one I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. So, thanks a lot for hanging in there.

LS: Of course.

CB: Alright, preliminary stuff. So we’re going to be talking about the overall ruler of the chart in ancient astrology. This talk is actually a lecture that I presented, first at the Northwest Astrology Conference two years ago, in May of 2017, and then again last year at the United Astrology Conference in May of 2018. Right?

LS: Mhmm.

CB: This is a lecture, typically. I presented it as a 75-minute lecture, but we’re going to do it as a blend between a lecture and a dialogue today because, in the past, when I first started doing the podcast, people would complain a lot about solo shows, and would always ask me to like, that they thought it was more interesting and engaging if it was more of a dialogue.

So you are joining me today for that reason, very graciously, I might add. Thanks for doing that.

LS: You’re welcome.

CB: So, you’re going to take the role of, like, the audience, in hopefully anticipating some of the questions that they might have, as we go through this and sort of just giving me somebody to bounce some of this off of, so that I’m not just like talking to myself into the void, or into the abyss, over the course of the next couple of hours.

LS: Yeah, yeah.

CB: So that’s one thing we meant to say. The other thing is that we’re going to try to keep this more concise than usual. I think we have a tendency to linger, and to talk a lot, and to go on side tracks. But we’re going to try to keep this relatively concise. We’re shooting for two hours, and definitely not longer than three. This is not going to be a Zodiacal Releasing episode, where we go for, like, 4 hours.

LS: Right.

CB: And we’re obviously starting rather late today, so that plays a factor, or plays a role as well.

LS: For sure.

CB: Alright, but at least Jupiter was on the Ascendant roughly when we started.

LS: That’s true.

CB: Okay. Alright, any other preliminaries before we jump into this?

LS: I feel like there was something but I can’t remember it now.

CB: So I’ve got a bunch of slides, and I’m going to try to show some of the slides, at least briefly, as we’re going through this talk, and also sort of switch between cameras, and things like that. Hopefully, I can do that all appropriately. Some of this stuff, the images may be posted on the Astrology Podcast website. I’m also going to mention some links at different points, but for the most part the video version should have the slides.

LS: Oh, I think you were just going to mention that you had the laptop out and it was kind of blocking it a little bit, only because the light was being weird, right? When we had it up?

CB: Yeah, we decided to throw the laptop up here, that way I can look at the slides and refer to them without having to look at the monitor to the left, which I know some people complained about a few episodes ago. And it was kind of annoying for me, having to look over constantly.

LS: Right.

CB: Or having to look at the monitor that’s kind of in front of us.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Anyway, we’re still getting used to the new studio, but we’re going to use this as an opportunity to try another new development, which is adding in a few new things. Alright, let’s do it.

LS: Okay.

CB: So, starting point for this talk, the title of this talk is “The Master of the Nativity,” and, so this talk was actually…The premise of this talk is that, traditionally, there were many different planetary rulers in the chart in traditional astrology, and most people know this, if you start studying traditional astrology for even a brief period of time. You realize that there’s the ruler of houses, right? Like the ruler of the seventh house indicating marriage, the ruler of the 10th house indicating career. There are Lots, and one of the ways that you use Lots, or Arabic Parts, is by looking at, not just the placement of the Lot, as a mathematical point, or the Arabic part or whatever you want to call it, but you end up focusing a lot on the ruler of the Lot as well. The ruler of the Lot of Fortune for example is very important, the ruler of the Lot of Spirit, the ruler of a Lot of Eros, and so on and so forth. There’s also triplicity rulers – like the Triplicity Ruler of the Sect Light technique that’s in Dorotheus and in Valens. And there’s also bound lords, or term lords, and many other rulers.

So, there’s many different rulers in traditional astrology. But some ancient astrologers believed in an overall ruler of the chart. And this is a very mysterious doctrine in ancient astrology, that’s not very well attested in the sources, where a lot of people refer to it, but there’s not a lot of surviving texts that tell you how to determine it, or anything else. But there was this general belief that there was this overall ruler of the chart that they called the Master of the Nativity. And this planet was thought to have the power to characterize the entire life of the native in some way. So, not just to be some small ruler of the house, or some topic in life, but instead, to have some broader overarching role to play in the natives’ life in general. Porphyry, though, one of the astrologers from the fourth century, says that this is actually one of the most difficult things, in all of ancient astrology, to calculate.

That’s the set up. This talk is based on– I’m going to give a broad overview of this topic based on a research project that I did in 2011, that was funded by Dr. H of Regulus Astrology, where he was researching a book on applying the doctrine of the Master of the Nativity, especially in later medieval sources, which he was already familiar with, being a student of Robert Zoller, and he wanted me to go back and do, sort of like a survey of all references to the Master of the Nativity in Hellenistic astrology, were the doctrine originated. So, I spent a summer doing that, and he paid me to do it, and I wrote up this little paper that was, like, 15 or 20 pages long for him for that. I never published that paper, and this talk, and this presentation, is partially based on that research, and is sort of my first time putting some of that out there, since I originally researched it in 2011. So yeah, that’s the set-up. Sound good?

LS: Mhmm.

CB: Okay. Do you remember me first talking about this, or was it only when I started putting the talk together?

LS: You mean, very early on, when you’re originally researching it?

CB: Yeah, do you remember that?

LS: Yeah, I do.

CB: I don’t remember if I talked about it.

LS: Yeah, yeah, I remember. I think I was visiting you here in Denver, before I moved here.

CB: Sure.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Okay. Alright, so I want to show a quote first from one of the most important ancient sources there is and one of the oldest sources in Western astrology, at least in terms of the Hellenistic astrological tradition, which started roughly around the late second or early first century BCE, and this is a fragment that survives from the work of Petosiris who’s one of the foundational authors of Hellenistic astrology. In this quote that survives from Petosiris, and this is actually from Vettius Valens who quotes Petosiris because he’s one of the few authors that seems to have actually had access to that important foundational text, but that text itself doesn’t survive anymore. So all we have is like little tiny quotes from it, from different later authors. We think Petosiris lived around 100 BCE and Valens was writing around 175 CE, so a few centuries later. But this is one of the quotes that does survive in Valens from Petosiris and it’s actually on the Master of the Nativity. In the Petosiris quote, it says:

”The beginning, the end, the controller and the measurement standard of the whole, is the Ruling Star of each nativity: it makes clear what kind of person the native will be, what kind of foundation his livelihood will have, what his character will be, what sort of body, <health and appearance> he will have, and all of the things that will accompany him in life. Without this star nothing, neither occupation, nor eminence, will come to anyone.”

So this is from Vettius Valens’ Anthology, book 2, chapter 41, sentences 3 through 4, translated by Mark Riley, in page 54 of his translations, with some modifications from me to make it make a little more sense compared to Riley’s translation conventions.

It’s a pretty major quote. Valens is quoting this at first from this very ancient author, in order to show how some ancient sources viewed this as a super important doctrine, and how they were really attributing a lot of stuff to it. Right? Like they were really this ancient source, Petosiris, obviously considered this to be a very not just crucial doctrine, but he seemed to have heaped a lot of importance in saying that almost everything depends on the Master of Nativity in a person’s life, that it’s the overall ruler of the chart in a way that accounts for a bunch of different things.

LS: Right, yeah. I mean, and you can see that. I mean, my initial impression is – sometimes hearing things like this – “well there’s the whole rest of the chart, you know, not everything can boil down to one placement”. But you can see people try to do this at different points would say, like, the final dispositor of a chart, or like saying I’m such-and-such planet dominant, or things like that. I think there’s different ways that people are actually always trying to find a specific planet that accounts for most things in their life.

CB: Yeah, there’s like echoes of that, not just as echoes of this doctrine specifically, but also different approaches to almost trying to do the same thing. Even on some level the Sun Sign, in a very simple sense, is that, in that, it’s like, putting a lot onto one placement in a chart. And for some people at least, they do really resonate with the Sun sign placement, for reasons that actually might be explained by this doctrine, that we’ll get into a little bit later in this talk. But this is a super ancient source, who says that there’s this really complicated thing to calculate, and that the person’s entire life will somehow depend on this one planetary ruler.

LS: Mhmm.

CB: Alright, so, in terms of the surviving treatments and the textual sources, because that was what my original research project was for this, a number of fragments and allusions to the Master of the Nativity survive in ancient sources. However unfortunately for us, there’s not many explicit instructions for how to calculate it. There’s like, I don’t know, 20 or 30 Hellenistic texts that survive. Some of them are full texts that survive, largely in their entirety, others are only in fragments. But there’s, like, let’s say 20 or 30 texts in different shapes or different conditions, that survived from the Greco-Roman tradition in Greek and Latin, right?

LS: Right.

CB: A lot of them, just about every one of them, mentions this doctrine, at least in passing, at some point and talks about– just mentions the Master of the Nativity at some point, or mentions how important it is in passing at some point. But many of them, unfortunately, just don’t explain how to calculate it, which is super annoying, if you’re trying to reconstruct this doctrine. It’s something they’re all aware of, and they’re all drawing on earlier source texts that talk about it, but then, unfortunately, all of those early source texts have been lost over the past 2000 years. One of the problems with that or as a result of that, there’s some ambiguity about how it was viewed in the early tradition. Like, what they conceptualized the Master of the Nativity as being for, or what their conceptual motivation was to begin with? As well as what they thought it was capable of doing, versus what they thought it was not capable of doing, due to the loss of so many of the early sources. Later in the tradition, it seems like the Master of the Nativity doctrine sort of got conflated with the length of life technique. And there’s some ambiguity surrounding that because, while I get the sense that there was some part of the Master of the Nativity technique, that definitely had application to studying the length of life, it seems like in a lot of the later sources that almost becomes the only thing that they’re using the technique, or part of the technique, for, and they sort of forget about some of the other parts of the technique that were applied to different things, like character analysis, for example.

LS: Right, yeah. And it sounds like, from that quote that you read earlier, like it definitely was supposed to, at least if that was representative. You know, talk about both the body, and the vitality, as well as many other things about the person’s life as a whole.

CB: Yeah, and it’s clear from that quote, that Petosiris was associating some vitality, and some things, that could be associated with, like, let’s say, the length of life, with the technique. But that wasn’t the only thing he was associating with the technique, if we just go back to the quote again.

LS: Yeah, exactly.

CB: Yeah, so it talks about the foundation of their livelihood, what kind of person the native will be, things about occupation and eminence, and all this other stuff in addition to saying what sort of body, health, and appearance you will have and even, if you look at that quote, the “body <health…>”, the “body” part is there the text but the “<health and appearance>” part is sort of bracketed because the translator or the editor thought that that fell out of the sentence, because it looked like there was something missing. So, that’s an inference based on the translator and the editor.

LS: Mhmm, I see.

CB: Anyway, so, that’s part of the premise. Despite that, despite the sketchiness of the sources for this technique, and the fact that very few explicit discussions of it, where they tell you explicitly how to calculate it survive, luckily there was one ancient source that did survive that does tell you how to calculate the technique.

It comes from the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry of Tyre, who lived somewhere around the Year 300 CE. Porphyry is most well-known for being the main student of the philosopher Plotinus, who was the founder of neoplatonism, which was one of the major dominant philosophical schools in late antiquity. It was the late antique version of Platonism, and Plotinus was one of the most famous, sort of later, Roman era philosophers. And Porphyry was famous for having taken Plotinus’s works, and edited them, and then published them. So, without Porphyry we wouldn’t know about Plotinus’s writings for the most part. But Porphyry himself was also a relatively well-respected philosopher in his own right, who wrote a bunch of philosophical texts that were influential in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. One of the things that’s interesting about Porphyry is that in his philosophical texts that we know that he wrote for sure, we see occasional references to astrology, which makes it clear that he was familiar with the subject.

There’s this other text. When we come to this other text that survives, that’s attributed to Porphyry, and sometimes scholars kind of question whether he actually wrote it, there are some good reasons to believe that he did. And this text is titled something like, “The Introduction to the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy”. It’s an introduction to Ptolemy, where at the beginning of the text the author says that Ptolemy talks about a lot of techniques and concepts, but he takes a lot of technical terminology for granted, so this author says, that he’s going to write an introduction, where he’s going to define a bunch of technical concepts, that are necessary in order to read Ptolemy’s work and understand it.

And this is the text that’s attributed to Porphyry, and some scholars are skeptical whether Porphyry wrote it but I tend to side with the people who believe that he did, because if you read Porphyry’s philosophical works, he’s obviously familiar with astrology and talks about it in several different places, including in one of his philosophical works he actually mentions and has this whole debate with another philosopher named Iamblichus about the Master of the Nativity. And then, of course, the Master of the Nativity, and how to calculate it, is one of the things that he deals with in The Introduction to the Tetrabiblos.

This text, The Introduction the Tetrabiblos, has some material, like the introduction, that might be unique to Porphyry, when he wrote it around the year 300, however most of it is actually just a set of definitions, that have been taken from an earlier text, which is the lost work of Antiochus of Athens, who probably lived somewhere around the first century.

Antiochus in the first century wrote a book of definitions, where he went through and defined basic astrological concepts. Porphyry seems to have taken – pretty much verbatim – a bunch of the definitions from Antiochus, and then turned that into a little booklet, and that became The Introduction to Ptolemy. This text, Porphyry’s version of it, is important, because it actually preserves the oldest set of instructions for calculating the Master of the Nativity and this is introduced in chapter 30 of Porphyry’s Introduction. So, super important text.

There’s a few different translations, either full translations, or partial translations of it at this point. The one that’s actually widely available, and the easiest and cheapest one to access, is the one by James Holden. So I think you can… I forgot what that title is but you just search like, “The Introduction to Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos by Porphyry of Tyre”, you’ll find it on Amazon for like $10 or $15.

LS: Nice.

CB: Yeah, it was just published. It was one of the many texts that Holden published. Apparently, since the 1950s he originally went to school and got a Master’s Degree in classics, and his Master’s thesis was on William Lilly. He wrote a whole master’s thesis on William Lilly, he studied classics in college, but then after college, he was in the army for a bit, but he ended up then going into and becoming an electrician, or something, and working in that field for the next several decades until he retired eventually in the 1980s. But one of the things he started doing way back in the 1950s was translating all these ancient astrological texts based on his ability to read Greek and Latin. One of the texts that he translated early on was The Introduction to Tetrabiblos by Porphyry, but he only published it in the last few years of his life, before he passed away in, I think, 2013 or 2014.

LS: Yes, he has a really interesting life story and was doing really interesting things, like that, with astrology, well before most other people were.

CB: Yeah, and it was because of his ability to read Greek and Latin, which most astrologers don’t have, and because it’s not, like, taught – it used to be taught in school, as one of the primary or secondary languages that you would learn, whereas nowadays usually it’s more like a modern language, like, you’ll learn French, or Spanish, or something like that. But back in the day you would learn Latin, and maybe Greek. So, because Holden had that, and because he studied classics in the school where knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary in order to read the classics, the ancient classical works, he was one of the few astrologers that was able to go back and read some of these texts in their original language. And one of the things that he did, and one of the things that he sort of, like, bequeathed to the astrological community, was this whole heap of translations, that he published through the American Federation of Astrologers towards the end of his life.

So, this is one of the texts that he translated. It’s, actually, a very short chapter, it’s not a super long chapter, so I don’t want to overhype it for those that ended up buying that book, because you might be disappointed at how brief it is. But he does outline the approach, probably the earliest approaches that survive, to calculating the Master of the Nativity. He ends up reporting what appeared to be, basically, two variant approaches, or two variant traditions, to this doctrine. One of them is potentially derived from the work of Nechepso and Petosiris. Petosiris, who I mentioned earlier, is one of the foundational authors of Hellenistic astrology, and he was often, sort of, grouped together with this other figure named Nechepso. Their relationship is unclear, but it seems, like, in some texts they’re mentioned as a pair, where they must have been attributed a text, early on, that was co-authored by them, but in other instances, it seems like there’s individual texts that they must have written separately. So, they’re kind of mysterious, foundational authors in Hellenistic astrology somewhere around 100 BCE.

The second variant, or the second approach, to the Master of the Nativity doctrine, Porphyry doesn’t say who it was from, but it appears to be from some early unknown source, perhaps a hermetic source of some sort…

LS: Mhm, okay.

CB: …some writing attributed to Hermes. I actually have a nice, handy little diagram.

LS: [chuckles] A little line diagram.

CB: I spent a lot of time working on this, like, countless hours putting this diagram together. For those listening to the audio version, it just shows a circle with “Nechepso and Petosiris” written in the middle and, to the right of that is the date, “circa 100 BCE”. To the left of that, there’s another circle with a “question mark”, where, let’s say, roughly contemporaneous with that, or maybe a little bit after them, is this other second work, that’s written on the Master of the Nativity by somebody that we don’t know, because Porphyry doesn’t mention the name. Both of those two texts are then drawn on by Antiochus who wrote his book of definitions sometime around the first century CE, give or take. And then from Antiochus we have Porphyry who drew on and wrote his texts sometime around the year 300 CE. And those dates on Porphyry are approximate, because he lived around the late third and early fourth century CE. So, that’s the chronology of the textual sources that we’re working with here.

Alright, so let’s, in terms of the historical stuff– I know, we’re moving kind of slow with this, part of it’s because it’s late. But part of it’s because I developed this talk two years ago and the last time I gave it was a year ago, so I’m a little rusty and I’m, sort of, remembering some of this as we go, and trying to make sure we outline it carefully and, sort of, deliberately. Anything, in terms of the historical stuff, that I should, not dwell on but expand on before we move on?
Any questions that you had anticipated an audience might have at this stage?

LS: I mean, the only question that I might anticipate, and I don’t know if this is anticipating my own type of questions or other people’s.

CB: No, no, no. Don’t anticipate your own questions, you have too good of questions.

LS: [chuckling] You’re right.

CB: And you’ll probably jump ahead to something I want to talk about or deal with later.

LS: I mean, it’s actually pretty general. I was just going to say the only question that would occur to me would be like, you know, how do we know how representative these things are, given all the things that weren’t passed down? Or: Do we know that these couple possible variants are the main ways that people actually used to calculate it?

CB: Right, that’s a good question. That’s too good of a question. [Leisa laughing] Don’t ask questions. This is why I wanted you to imagine you were somebody else, to ask a more simple question, like “what is the ruler of a sign?” or something like that.

LS: [laughing] No, this seems like a common question.

CB: Yeah, I think if they were more anonymous, like the anonymous source ― we don’t know how prevalent that one was because we don’t know what the name is. But the fact, that they’re quoting Nechepso and Petosiris, and they’re attributing some of this doctrine to them and, in fact, we know when later authors talk about the length of life technique, that they often bring Nechepso and Petosiris up. So, we know from just that perspective that it’s widely quoted. We also know that Nechepso and Petosiris are the two most widely quoted ancient authors, basically.

LS: Right.

CB: So, if a doctrine’s being attributed to Nechepso and Petosiris, and if we can verify from other authors, like Valens, for example, who talks about Nechepso and Petosiris, when he talks about the length of life technique, or Ptolemy alludes to Petosiris as “the ancient one” when he first starts talking about the length of life technique. If we can cross-reference, and we know this doctrine is coming from Nechepso and Petosiris and that important foundational text, then we know it was pretty widely used, because we do know that the Nechepso and Petosiris text was one of the most widely cited ancient texts, and we know that it played, some sort of, foundational role in the early period of Hellenistic astrology being synthesized around the first century BCE that led to it kind of exploding in popularity across the ancient world.

And additionally, Nechepso and Petosiris are not just two of the most widely quoted ancient sources by other astrologers, but they were actually so famous, and their texts were so influential, that they were actually quoted by non-astrologers. There’s like, philosophers, and there’s somebody that satirized Nechepso and Petosiris at one point, the poet Juvenal, there’s other texts on magical or medical things that cite Nechepso. So, they get cited– they were so influential in their text was so widely known as like the compendium on ancient astrology that they get cited not just in the astrological community but by non-astrologers as well.

I’m trying to think if there’s any equivalent to that in modern times, but I can’t. It’s like if Robert Hand wasn’t just known in the astrological community, but you heard him being mentioned in non-astrological sources or if he was, like, mocked on Saturday Night Live, because his astrological prowess was so widely renowned, or something like that.

LS: Okay, I believe you, that was a good answer.

CB: That’s the long answer.That’s why you don’t want to ask me good questions…

LS: Okay, just mediocre questions. [laughing]

CB: …because I will go on a twenty minute digression in order to answer. We’ll be here until four in the morning.

LS: Right, yeah. Let’s not do that.

CB: So, back to the presentation. There’s my little line graph. Let’s actually introduce this doctrine, and let’s get into it. This is Porphyry’s, sort of, starting point for the Master of the Nativity. Porphyry says that there’s actually 4 important rulers of the chart. And here’s the four important rulers. The first one is known as the predominator. The predominator is used to find the Master of the Nativity. Next is the Master of the Nativity itself, which is the oikodespotēs. And one thing I should state at this point, and, usually, I think I left it out of the UAC talk, because I wanted to keep moving, but oikodespotēs actually means: oikos means ‘house’ or ‘home’, and despotēs means ‘master’. So technically if you translated it super literally, which some translators, like Robert Schmidt do… And I should have mentioned him, because he’s the other major translation of this text, and honestly the better translation is the one by Robert Schmidt, in his book Definitions and Foundations, where he went through, and he translated the work of Porphyry, but also the other fragments that survived from Antiochus of Athens, as well as some fragments by Rhetorius of Egypt, in order to attempt to reconstruct the original text of Antiochus. That book is a little bit hard to get though; it’s not available on Amazon or anything like that. I mentioned Holden’s, even though Holden has a less literal, and to some extent, less accurate translation; Holden’s translation at least is widely available, so that’s one of the reasons why I mentioned it.

Schmidt and others sometimes translate this phrase very literally where it means, like, “the House Master of the Nativity”. But I think it’s, like, being overly literal and almost unnecessarily literal when the primary emphasis of it is just the notion that it’s the master or the overall ruler. That’s one of the reasons why I shorten it, and I use the phrase “Master of the Nativity”, but you could also equally, and some people do, translate it as “the House Master of the Nativity”. You’re laughing at that phrase

LS: Yeah, I actually am. There’s a musical song called “Master of the House”, and I’m imagining some people picking up on that right now, and doing a whole astrological take off of this.

CB: [laughing] Maybe we could add that music at the end.

LS: [laughing] Okay.

CB: Alright, so there’s the Master of the Nativity, the second important ruler of the Nativity. The third is what’s called the Co-Master or the joint Master of the Nativity. And we’ll explain what that is later, that’s the third one. And then, finally, the fourth ruler is known as the Lord of the Nativity, or the Kurios.

So, right away we’re running into an issue, where as soon as Porphyry introduces the doctrine of the Master of the Nativity, he’s saying there’s not one overall ruler of the chart, that there’s four separate rulers, to begin with, that are important. So, already we’re running into a bit of an issue here.

LS: Right.

CB: We’re back to having multiple planetary rulers in their chart, rather than just one. So, Porphyry uses an analogy at this point, which is kind of interesting and maybe important, where he says that each of these different rulers are like the different roles on, like, a ship or a sailing vessel, where, he says, that it’s sort of like how there’s a difference between the captain of a ship versus the owner of a ship. And maybe you could extend that to other metaphors as well, or other roles on a ship, like the guys that are steering, the guy’s rowing, the guys cleaning the deck, or the cook or what have you. That there’s different roles on the ship, and different officers associated with a ship.

This may be part of a broader nautical metaphor, that was used in ancient astrology as an interpretive principle, and there’s some ambiguity about this point, because we see traces of a possible nautical metaphor in certain pieces, but this statement by Porphyry is one of the few explicit statements. But, the problem is, when you read the text, it’s not clear if he’s explicitly saying that ancient astrologers used nautical metaphor, or if he’s simply just using an analogy, in order to explain what the astrologers are doing. It’s not really clear, and there’s some ambiguity.

So, in my interpretation, if there was a broader nautical metaphor and he was trying to make a one-to-one correspondence in that analogy, then in my interpretation the Master of the Nativity would be like the steersman or the captain at the ship, whereas the Lord of the Nativity would end up being equivalent to the owner of the ship, based on that analogy, for reasons that we’ll get into a little bit later. So, some ambiguity on that point. We’re not really clear if he’s just making an analogy or if this was actually viewed as some broader interpretive principle, but if it was used as an interpretive principle, that’s probably how it would have gone.

Okay, let’s get into the actual calculations. So, Porphyry eventually tells us how to calculate the Master of the Nativity. In both approaches to finding the Master of the Nativity, the first thing you have to do, before you can identify the Master of the Nativity, you first have to find what’s called the predominator. The predominator, essentially, it’s the planet or the point in the chart that designates the Master of the Nativity. Okay?

LS: Yeah.

CB: There’s three candidates for the predominator and the three candidates for the predominator are the Sun, the Moon, and the Ascendant. Those are your three possible candidates. So if you’re thinking about your own chart right now, which pretty much every astrologer does at this point, because everybody always applies techniques to their own charts first, to see if they work and, sort of, try to rationalize and make sense of them, which is fine. Those are your three candidates, your Sun, your Moon, or your Ascendant. The strongest of the two luminaries, between the Sun and the Moon, is preferred as the predominator. So you’re looking at your two luminaries, the one that’s more well-placed in the chart, based on criteria that we’ll get into in a second, is preferred. That planet that is the more well-placed is said to be the predominator, or another translation of the term that’s used is the Victor.

So, this is equivalent to, essentially, the later medieval doctrine of the Almuten. And when you look at Ben Dykes’s translations, for example, the term Almuten is like a Latin rendering, or transliteration, basically, of an Arabic term that Ben Dykes translates it as “the Victor”. But you can also translate it from the original Greek, as “the predominator.” This is sort of the Greek equivalent of what eventually, in later astrology, when they received this doctrine, became the doctrine of the Almuten, basically.

The strongest luminary is preferred, and that becomes the predominator, or the Victor, of the chart, if one of them is more well-placed than the other. However if both luminaries are weak, or are not well-placed in the chart, then you end up defaulting to the Ascendant. So the Ascendant is not one of your primary possibilities, but instead it’s sort of the fallback position, if both of the luminaries are poorly placed in the chart.

Part of the premise of the predominator, seems to be that it’s supposed to represent the life force and the vitality of the native. And that’s one of the reasons, why they’re trying to find, or that appears to be, from what I can tell, in inferring what’s going on here, that seems to be one of the reasons why they’re focused on only a really well-placed planet because it has to be the planet, that’s well-placed enough to be able to represent and show the vitality and the life force of the native. And if it’s not, if everything’s poorly placed, then it almost doesn’t matter, because they believed that the native wouldn’t live very long anyways, or something like that. And that’s when you start getting into the crossover with the length of life technique, where the predominator becomes very important.

LS: Right, that makes sense.

CB: There’s three factors that you take into account, which can make one of the luminaries the Victor, or the predominator. You’re trying to decide, between the Sun and the Moon, which one’s capable of being the predominator, or the Victor. The first consideration you take into account is that the one that matches the sect of the chart is preferred, or is favored over the one that does not match the sect of the chart. So, the luminary that’s of the sect in favor, or the luminary that’s contrary to the sect in favor, the luminary that’s of the sect in favor is preferred. So that means, you’re going to prefer– in a day chart, by this first consideration, the Sun is going to be preferred, whereas in a night chart, the Moon is going to be preferred right.

LS: Right.

CB: So, I was born in the daytime, I was born at like 1:28 pm, so it was not long in the afternoon, the Sun is in the middle of the sky. Actually, let’s throw up a diagram, for those that aren’t, for some reason, familiar with the concept of sect yet, which I feel like everybody should be.

LS: Well, lots of people are, but there are always new people tuning into the podcast.

CB: Yeah, we’re getting there. You determine if it’s a day chart or a night chart by looking at the exact degrees of the Ascendant-Descendant axis, which represent the horizon, where the Sun rises at the Ascendant each morning, and it sets at the Descendant, in the evening, each day. And if the Sun in your chart is anywhere above the exact degrees of the Ascendant and Descendant, then you have a day chart, whereas if the Sun is anywhere below the Ascendant and Descendant, then you have a night chart. Right?

LS: Yeah, so sunrise to sunset exactly.

CB: Right, sunrise to sunset. There’s a little bit of ambiguity about if the Sun is really close to the Ascendant or really close to the Descendant, because there’s a little space of time, where you have that in-between space of twilight, where it’s becoming daytime, or it’s becoming nighttime. We’re going to skip over that ambiguity now because this isn’t a talk on sect but let’s just pretend, for the sake of argument, that it’s something really simple like that of, if the Sun’s anywhere in the top half of the chart: day chart. Anywhere in the bottom half the chart: night chart.

LS: Definitely.

CB: So, I was born in the mid-, early afternoon. I have a day chart, so the Sun would be preferred according to this first criteria.

LS: Right.

CB: Leisa, you were born– don’t feel like sharing?

LS: [laughing] Nope.

CB: Alright, you were born at some point

LS: At some point, you know, during a 24-hour period. [laughing]

CB: Alright, astrologers that don’t like sharing their charts. [Leisa laughing] So, that’s criterion number one. If somebody, for example, hypothetically, was born with a night chart, then we would prefer the Moon, because it’s nighttime.

LS: Yup.

CB: Pretty simple. That’s condition one. Criteria, or condition, two is the luminary that is more angular – in terms of angular/succedent/cadent – the luminary that is more angular is preferred, over the luminary that is less angular.

LS: Yeah, so it’s more operative, basically.

CB: Yeah, operative, and that’s one of the terms, chrēmatistikos was a term that was frequently used to describe what angularity does in ancient astrology and that means in a mercantile context, it can mean conducive to business, it’s also sometimes translated as “operative”, it’s sometimes referred to as “busy”, and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of different keywords, and that’s one of the hardest terms to translate that there’s been some of the most debate about in some of the translations of Hellenistic texts is how to translate chrēmatistikos, which is the term that’s used to refer to what angularity does. But “busy” is probably one of the most simple literal translations. The planets were thought to be more busy when they were in angular houses, they were thought to be somewhat less busy in succedent houses, and they were thought to be completely not busy or whatever the opposite of busy is, like slack.

LS: Idle.

CB: Idle, when they were in cadent houses. So, if you’re looking at a chart and you have your two luminaries, your second criteria that you want to pay attention to is which one is angular, and which one is succedent, and which one is cadent, or whichever of those placements they are. The one that’s in a more angular house will win out and become the predominator and we’ll get more into that later.

Condition number three is the one that is more Eastern, more towards the east side of the chart, which is towards the rising signs since the Ascendant is in the east, is preferred over the luminary that is over on the right side of the chart, towards the Descendant, which is the West.

The main thing that you have to remember is just, Ascendant is the East, or is Eastern, and Descendent is West, or Western, which is, actually, basic astronomy, in terms of basic observational astronomy associated with astrology. But astrology’s become so abstracted, and so removed from the astronomy, at this point, that astrologers sometimes don’t know that distinction.

LS: Right.

CB: So here’s a diagram that shows the Ascendant basically being associated with the East, and the Descendant being associated with the West. And according to this third criteria, which I’m kind of summarizing from Porphyry, or the way that Porphyry, actually, summarizes the doctrine, is that the luminary that’s more on the Eastern side of the chart, which is essentially the left side of the chart, is preferred over the luminary that is more on the right side of the chart, or in the western side of the chart. Make sense?

LS: Yeah, definitely. I think, when I first heard about this whole entire concept of the Master of the Nativity, I thought it sounded really complicated upon first glance, but then when you think about each of those first three principles, they do follow just basic common sense of some of the astrological rules about what would be strong in a chart.

CB: Yeah, and that’s one of the things we have to realize, like we know that now, in retrospect, that like angularity, for example, is something that’s still around in astrology and that’s a doctrine that still exists. It’s weird, because part of the reason that that still survives as a concept in Western astrology, 2000 years later, is actually, in some ways, because this ancient doctrine about the Master of the Nativity survived, and that this was a core piece of it. The notion of angularity, succeedency, and cadency was central to it is part of the reason that that doctrine survived 2000 years later, even though we don’t use it. We apply to different things today, in terms of prominence, but this is almost, if not the origin of that specific technique or concept, it’s pretty early in terms of its popularization, because it’s coming from partially the foundational texts of authors like Nechepso and Petosiris, who seem to have created, or synthesized, some of these doctrines, and then disseminated them widely in the ancient worlds, that they became so popular and so crucial in the Roman Empire, and the Mediterranean, and the surrounding areas.

LS: Yeah, and I’m just thinking these make sense in terms of common sense rules with traditional astrology, more so in terms of, both the angularity, that you were just talking about, but also the sect light being more important for your life or your chart, the Sun during the day or the Moon at night. And then, if it’s in the left side of the chart, it’s like the planet is either about to rise, or has just risen recently, it seems stronger than setting and becoming dark.

CB: That’s a really good point. That’s a good way of conceptualizing that rising over in the East, that the East is associated with rising, ascendancy, and an increase in some ways. Whereas, the West and the Descendant is associated with sinking, and decrease in some sense.

LS: Right, exactly.

CB: Yeah. Some of it’s straightforward traditional stuff, like angularity, or sect, whereas the Eastern thing, although that’s a good point, that we could make that association, it’s a good access point for understanding. Otherwise “East versus West,” it’s one that’s a little bit more obscure, that we’re not as used to using as a core technique in astrology, certainly not in modern astrology.

LS: Yeah, for sure.

CB: And that’s actually tied into, and that might be a good digression, because you were asking me the other day, like yesterday, about where or how old that doctrine is of planets being in the Ascendant or the Midheaven indicating events in the first part of the life, whereas placements in the Descendant and the IC being indicative of events later, in the second part of life.

LS: Right.

CB: And we had a whole conversation about that, and how that actually seems to be one of the earliest doctrines that either was a precursor to the doctrine of the twelve houses, or was introduced super-early around the same time, and was part of the basic conceptual framework, that then that twelve houses was built on.

LS: Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

CB: Sure. Alright, let’s keep moving. So these are our three sets of criteria for calculating the Master of the Nativity. One of the things already, at this point, that we have to make a point of talking about, and is a little bit of a digression, but not hugely, and is interesting, and this is the point where we have to return back to a topic, that’s come up at different points in the podcast. And this is something I’ve been meaning to come back to, because it’s been part of a long term research project for me over the years, which is, the issue of house division and specifically the question of why are there so many different forms of house division? And why has this been a debate, or disagreement, for astrologers for a long time? But also, something I tried to address in a chapter of my book was when did this debate first arise, and why did it first arise? And interestingly, it’s within the context of this technique of the Master of the Nativity, that some of those debates surrounding house division may have actually gotten their start.

So, one of the things that you can see, that’s really obvious, when you read those let’s say 10, 20, or 30 Hellenistic astrological texts that survive, basically, from the Roman Empire, is that most of the time authors like Vettius Valens, for example, are using whole sign houses especially in their example chart. So, Valens has over a hundred example charts and in almost all of them he uses whole sign houses. And he’s not just doing that abstractly, for the purpose of demonstration, or for idealized examples, or something like that, because a lot of his example charts wouldn’t work and wouldn’t make sense, like the point that he tries to make with the chart wouldn’t make sense if you switched to another form of house division. So, he literally must have believed and must have used that as his primary form of house division, in order to explain why those hundred plus examples that he uses throughout his nine different books would make any sense.

So, most of the time he uses whole-sign houses, however, when he gets to the point where he starts talking about calculating the predominator, and when he introduces, in Book III of the Anthology, the length of life technique, the technique that incorporates the predominator in order to attempt to calculate the length of a person’s life – which ancient astrologers considered to be not just possible, but a very important technique that you needed to use to some extent with clients – Valens, and other astrologers, at this point, when they get to the length of life technique, and they start talking about the predominator, that tends to be when they will introduce the other forms of house division of what I call degree-based forms of house division which includes equal houses, which is a degree-based form of house division, but also quadrant house systems. It’s at this point.

So, Valens introduces quadrant houses, he actually introduces the Porphyry house system when he starts talking about calculating the predominator, which is interesting, because it’s like elsewhere– this is in Book III of the Anthology and if you back up to Book II, where he starts using example charts, he uses several dozen example charts all using a whole-sign houses. But then, for some reason, when he gets to this specific technique of calculating the predominator, then he stops and he introduces quadrant houses for the first time. And what’s interesting is he introduces it as if it’s a concept that he wasn’t otherwise using up to that point, or that required being introduced, because the reader wouldn’t be taking it for granted up till that point. So, it’s almost like it’s something unique to this technique, in a way, that he’s introducing, within the context of this specific technique, is quadrant houses.

Interestingly, Ptolemy does something similar. In Ptolemy most of the time in his text, when he refers to houses in passing, and he seems to often refer to them as signs, as if he’s using whole sign houses, just like Valens is, in most of the other different topical chapters of his book, when he talks about children, or marriage, or career, or what-have-you – he seems to refer to the twelve houses as they’re signs. But then, all of a sudden, just like Valens, when he gets to the length of life technique he introduces this other form of house division, where he stops, and suddenly becomes very deliberate about outlining this other approach.

Historically, there’s actually been a lot of debates about what system of house division Ptolemy introduced at this point. But the two modern translators who have commented on this are Robert Schmidt and James Holden, who are two of the only contemporary astrologers in modern times – both of them had passed away in the past few years now – but they’re two of the only people that read Greek and translated this chapter of Ptolemy, so that they could be able to say something about it. And they both said that they thought that Ptolemy was introducing equal houses at this point, based on their reading of the Greek. But it was a weird modified form of equal houses, where it started five degrees above the Ascendant.

So, it sounds weird, but it’s the ancestor of and the origin of the modern “five degree rule”, where astrologers will say, “Well, if a planet is within five degrees of the cusp of a house, then you interpret it as being in the next house,” or, “you interpret it, as being in both houses,” or whatever…, it sort of varies. But that’s the ancestor of this, going back to Ptolemy and in this chapter on the length of life technique, Ptolemy introduces what seems to be equal houses, but he says that it begins, or the power of the house extends five degrees before the actual starting point – so five degrees above the Ascendant.

LS: Okay.

CB: This is strange in and of itself, and this is important in terms of the history of the house division…

And I go over this whole thing of it, talking about this in my chapter, because I wrote a long chapter on House Division. And I forgot to mention that this talk…So I gave this talk at NORWAC, two years ago for the first time, and I gave it at UAC also, which was the main target, the final time I meant to give it. But it was a two-part talk, so it was this talk, and then I also gave a talk on the origins of the house division issue in ancient astrology, so it’s like a sister talk or companion talk for it with this, where I expand upon this issue a little bit more. That’s something I want to record as a podcast as well at some point to follow up on this one. So, I guess, for people in the future you’ll be able to listen to that at some point, but for those listening to it now, in the present, as soon as I release that you’ll have to wait for me to expand on this more in the future.

LS: Right.

CB: Anyway, the fact that they both introduced this degree-based form of house division at this point, when they’re talking about the predominator and calculating it – I think what happened is there was probably… It took me a while, and in my book, which I published in early 2017, I sort of, I had the right idea and I was going in the right direction, where I speculated that it seems like, they were both drawing on the Petosiris text which was their common source, and that was the reason, why both of them would introduce a degree-based form of house division at this point. It was because the text that they were drawing on must have done the same thing, and they must have been following after that example by then introducing it.

The fact that they diverged and they introduced two different forms of degree-based form of house division, I speculated, must have meant that there was some ambiguity in the text about which form of house division should be introduced. And part of the reason why that makes a little bit of sense, that there would be ambiguity, is that the ancient authors, especially Valens, but also other authors, are constantly complaining about how cryptic the Nechepso and Petosiris text is. And they’re constantly complaining about it, as if it was written in some sort of weird coded language. And part of the issue, where we have some fragments, that Valens and other authors preserve, is that parts of the text may have been written in verse, so that it was written almost in the form of an instructional poem, which can make it hard to read and not very straightforward, but instead has this artistic flavor to it.

LS: Right.

CB: So, that’s part of it; the other part of it is that it may have been tied in with some mystery traditions, so that it was deliberately…In some mystery traditions they would be deliberately sort of obscure or difficult in their writings, in order to give it a barrier to entry so that those who were not initiates of the secret mystery school, even if they got their hands on the text, couldn’t understand it.

LS: Yeah, that makes sense.

CB: And Valens he quotes, if you read Book VII of Valens, has some really long quotes from Nechepso, and it’s just like super bizarre weird wording, and weird terminology, that even for Valens was hard to understand. So, even for Valens who’s living in the second century CE. He’s like: I don’t fully know what this means, but this is what I think it means. Or, at one point, for example, he quotes a couple passages from Nechepso and Petosiris on how to calculate the Lot of Fortune, and it’s really weird wording that could be interpreted a number of different ways. And he says as much, that different authors– different astrologers, later astrologers, like him, who read this passage have come to different conclusions about what it means, which is funny, because then that actually means some of the debates about how to calculate a Lot of Fortune, and whether to reverse the calculation for the Lot of Fortune for day and night charts, grew out of these debates about how to read the Nechepso-Petosiris text. And so you see some authors like Ptolemy saying, “No, you shouldn’t reverse the calculation of a Lot of Fortune by day and night, you should always use the day calculation”. And then, you have other astrologers, like Valens and Dorotheus, apparently reversing it for day and night charts. So, it’s growing out of textual ambiguity on what were cryptic or mysterious source texts from the first century BCE.

LS: Right, yeah. I would definitely do that if I was writing something. I would definitely write it cryptically so people would be arguing about it for several thousand years.

CB: Yeah, well it’s really tough and it’s funny, because I quote this passage from Valens in my book where he throws up his hands at one point, figuratively, is like “Either these guys are just being–” He’s talking about Nechepso, he’s like “Either this guy is just being difficult and cryptic, in order to make this doctrine as difficult to understand as possible, or he doesn’t know what he’s talking about at all”.

LS: [laughing] Right.

CB: Which is really funny to read in this second century author writing in Greek, from the year 175 that, even though to us Valens is our ancient, from almost 2000 years ago, Valens himself was drawing on what he thought to be his ancients, which were texts that were written a few centuries before he lived.

So, we know that that was an issue already with things like a Lot of Fortune, but it seems like it was also an issue here, and, I think, this is one of the primary origins of the house division debate, is that it was because they were all introducing the degree-based forms of house division when they started calculating the predominator. It’s because they were drawing on the Petosiris text and the Petosiris text must have had some ambiguities, in that it was clear that you were supposed to use some sort of degree-based form of house division within the context of this technique, but it wasn’t clear enough about which one to use.

So, that’s as far as I got, and that’s how I set it up in my book. But at some point in the past two years after my book came out, I figured out, when I was working on this talk for UAC and for NORWAC, what the final ambiguity was that must have caused the most debate. And I think it was that third criteria, in the criteria that Porphyry outlines on calculating the predominator, and it’s that one that has to do with East versus West. So the technique– and I should state, in the Antiochus Summary and in Valens, both of them outline rules for calculating the predominator and like, “if the Sun is in the first and the Moon is in the ninth, then the Sun is the predominator”, or “if the Moon is in the eleventh and the Sun is in whatever, then the Moon is the predominator.” Antiochus and Porphyry, and Valens, both outline a set of rules for determining this and they’re not drawing on each other, which means that must be the original source text. They must be paraphrasing the Porphyry text, or the original Petosiris text. In that text it uses this vague directional language. Instead of saying, like, first house, seventh house, 10th house, it says, “if a planet is rising in the east, and another planet is declining in the west, then the one rising in the East is predominator”. When you read the Antiochus’ Summary, it just uses that vague directional language. But when you read the same rules in Valens, he translates it and he says, “when one planet is in the first house, and other planets that’s in the seventh house”, so it’s clear that Valens understood that to be referring to the houses, and he just translates it into that language. But the original text used this really weird vague directional language that talked about directionality and about angularity.

The debate, that I realized at one point, that they must have had, is whether to read references to East and West as super literal, or to read them more figuratively, more broadly speaking. Because the problem is that when you get into the degree-based forms of house division, technically it’s only quadrant houses that divides the chart, strictly speaking, into East and West. Because the degree of the quadrant Midheaven is actually the dividing point between East and West. I have a few diagrams that illustrate this a little bit. One of these, and this is from the House Division talk. It shows the three different Midheavens and I spend a lot of time going on into this in the book, and eventually when I record that other podcast. That’s the thing, I’m re-recording these now because the audio in my talks from the United Astrology Conference didn’t come out well. One of them wasn’t great at all, and then the microphone died halfway through the House Division talks, so we didn’t get a good recording from that. That’s why I’m re-recording these here, and then I’m going to release them as podcasts because I feel like the information is important, and I want to get it out there, as broadly as possible.

Alright, so here’s a diagram that shows the three different Midheavens. The way to look at this is that– because astrologers, they would use the term Midheaven, but they would use it– some of the ambiguity in reading the ancient texts is sometimes they would use the term Midheaven, and they would be referring to the 10th whole-sign house, or the 10th sign from the rising sign. So sometimes they’d call the entire 10th sign “the Midheaven”. Other times, Midheaven means the 90-degree point, the point that is exactly 90° upwards in the chart relative to the degree of the Ascendant. And that’s the equal-house Midheaven. So, in equal houses you start from the degree of the Ascendant, then you measure 30 degrees downwards, and that first 30° increment is the first house, then the 30° after that is the second house, and you just keep going around, but you use the degree of the Ascendant as the starting point. In that approach the 90° point, 90 degrees upwards, is the Midheaven. So, what’s interesting about that point is that’s actually always the highest spot on the ecliptic, and that’s one of the things that I am demonstrating here in this image. And I had some help from, actually, two friends. Gemini Brett, I think, is the one who helped me put this diagram together, who had previously done a podcast on astronomy for astrologers, and he has some great talks getting into observational astronomy and some of this, that I’d recommend to people.

So, that’s the second thing that we referred to as the Midheaven, is essentially the equal-house Midheaven. And then, of course, the third thing that they’ll refer to as the Midheaven is the quadrant-house Midheaven. And there’s different ways of describing what the quadrant house Midheaven is, but one of the ways of describing it, that’s important, is it’s literally the dividing line between East and West.

The issue – and the thing that it took me a long time to wrap my mind around this – the Ascendant, even though it’s due East, it’s not exactly in the East. The Ascendant is not always exactly east, and the Descendant is not always exactly west. And you need an animated video, which I don’t have right now, in order to explain that properly. You just have to understand that even though the Ascendant is towards the East, it’s not exactly in the east, and the Descendant is not exactly in the West. Okay?

LS: Yeah.

CB: However, the quadrant house Midheaven – the meridian,  which is the north-south axis – it’s essentially what the quadrant-house Midheaven is. So, one of the takeaways then, or one of the important pieces, is it means the quadrant-house Midheaven is more tied in to the directionality of East versus West whereas the equal-house Midheaven, and to some extent the 10th whole-sign house, are more tied into what is the highest point on the ecliptic or the zodiac let’s say, in other words, at any one moment in time.

LS: Yeah, that makes sense.

CB: So, the debate or the ambiguity, I think, came in here, which is that the Petosiris text was talking about if a planet is rising in the east, and another planet is declining in the West, then planet A is the predominator. And the question, I think, the astrologers ran into was, are we talking about East and West in general terms, in the sense, that the Ascendant is kind of in the East, and the descendant is kind of in the West? Or are we, like this, for example if you just throw up this diagram, the first house is kind of associated with the East and the seventh house is kind of  associated with the West. That would be a more loose interpretation of the Petosiris text. Or did the original authors intend this, strictly speaking, to mean exactly in the East and the West? In which case it’s only in quadrant houses that that would actually work because the Midheaven in quadrant houses, one of the things that it is, is the dividing line between East and West.

LS: Right.

CB: So, that’s why somebody, like Valens, might have deliberately introduced quadrant houses at this point, because he’s reading this source text, that says “if a planets in the East, then it’s preferred over a planet in the West”, in which case you really want to know exactly where the dividing line is between East and West in order to make that determination.

LS: Right.

CB: Conversely, somebody like Ptolemy, evidently, if it’s true, that he was using equal houses, he may have interpreted it a little bit more broadly, and a little bit less literally, in a more generic sense, just to mean like, he may use equal houses and just said East is the left side of the chart and the houses associated with the left side of the chart in equal houses, whereas West is the right side of the chart and the houses associated with the right side of the chart in equal houses. So, he’s still using a degree-based form of house division, where the degree of the Ascendant is the starting point of the first house, and the degree of the Descendant and it’s the starting point of the seventh house, but then there would have been a little bit more ambiguity about the 10th house using equal houses, not being tied in exactly to East and West, but instead, East and West being tied more into the Ascendant and Descendant in that approach. Alright, have I lost you completely?

LS: Oh no, I’m actually following all of this, but it’s just kind of crazy how– I do think we should move on after this but it is crazy how much can hinge on a single word, or two words.

CB: I know, and two things. It’s like, one, it’s the same thing with a Lot of Fortune, and we can see that, and that’s really well-documented, and we also known even in modern times– because even if contemporary astrologers, or 20th century astrologers, didn’t really know what the hell to do with a Lot of Fortune, there was some awareness, because Ptolemy’s texts survived, that there were some later astrologers, like William Lilly in the 17th century, that followed Ptolemy in not reversing the calculation for day and night charts. But then there was other astrologers that were influenced by the Dorotheus’ tradition, like Bonatti, and other astrologers like that, that did reverse it for day and night charts. And all of that really does potentially seem to go back to, potentially, this ambiguous source text. So, this is the first time anyone’s made this argument, as far as I’m aware, and that’s one of the reasons I was so excited about it and wanted to present at a UAC, which is one of the biggest conferences of the decades last year, because I thought, and I still think, I’ve pretty much figured out part of – this is not the entire story when it comes to house division and there’s other pieces, but that this is part of where some of the great debates and ambiguity over house division come from, is some of the debates over interpreting the language in this ambiguous source text, that first introduced the length of life technique. And then in so many subsequent Hellenistic and medieval and Renaissance astrologers, who then also tried to calculate if not the length of life technique itself, at least tried to calculate the Master of the Nativity or the overall Ruler of the chart and were influenced by doctrines like this. They were all, in some ways, sort of influenced by it, in some way even if indirectly.

LS: Mhm, sure.

CB: Yeah, so, isn’t that crazy, though? I mean, that’s one of the things that blows my mind, the idea that the whole house division debate for the past 2000 years could be partially motivated, initially, by what is fundamentally like, a textual debate or a textual ambiguity.

LS: Right, yeah, which is pretty crazy. Also in terms of where it’s introduced, and when, and for what purposes. And that different house systems could, conceivably at least, be meant for different purposes, or something like that.

CB: Right, yeah. And it’s right away in the early commentators on Ptolemy, really quickly, there’s a debate. If you read the text of Hephaestio of Thebes who lived somewhere in the early fifth century. Ptolemy was in the mid-second century. But already by the time of Hephaestio, a few centuries later, Ptolemy is a big deal, and several astrologers have written commentaries on Ptolemy’s astrological texts and started to have debates over what form of house division Ptolemy intended. Because then there starts being debates about his texts, so we’re talking about the later generation, not even the Nechepso-Petosiris text, but then there’s debates over what Ptolemy himself said. And that generated a lot of spilled ink about that chapter of Ptolemy, and whether he was intending an equal house division, which at first Hephaestio says that seems to be what Ptolemy was outlining, but then later he cites a commentator on Ptolemy named Pancarius, who argued that Ptolemy actually intended to introduce quadrant houses at this point. So, then there ends up being a bunch of debates about that and it’s really interesting and you can read that in Hephaestio in the fifth century. But it just spawns out of this, just like tons and tons of debates about house division. And what’s fascinating, is just a lot of it is more textually based, rather than being something that’s based or motivated initially, in some of these texts at least, by practicality, or something, like experience, or empiricism.

One of the things I will say about the empirical angle, and about what some of them may have been going for by introducing… what the Nechepso and Petosiris text might have been going for in introducing some form of degree-based form of house division at this point is they were really focused on planets reaching the degrees of angles, or reaching important astronomical points, being at the height of their power. And it’s because of the fact that this whole discussion is taking place within the context of the Predomination argument where they’re trying to find the planet that is victorious, and that is powerful in the chart, and is powerful enough to represent the life force and the vitality of the native. That’s part of the reason why they switch to the degree-based forms of house division here. Because if you think about the degree of the Ascendant, which is the starting point of the first house both in equal houses, as well as in quadrant houses, the degree of the Ascendant is the point at which the planets rise over the horizon and emerge from underneath the earth.

LS: Right.

CB: And, in fact, that entire first house in quadrant houses, or equal houses, is the point where the planet is rising up and getting ready to emerge into visibility, in some sense, right? Visibility, in this context, is almost another sort of alternate way to say “power”, ”importance”, or “Predomination” or what have you.

LS: Right.

CB: The same is somewhat true for the quadrant house Midheaven. Because the other thing that the quadrant house Midheaven does is it actually is the point at which the planets reach their highest elevation in the sky. So, the quadrant house Midheaven is not just the dividing point between East and West but the quadrant house Midheaven is also the point at which planets reach their highest elevation.

LS: Mhm.

CB: So, again, that could be the reason why some astrologers, like Valens or potentially the original Nechepso and Petosiris text, if they intended quadrant houses to be used, this could be the reason why they’re introducing quadrant houses at this point because they’re really focused on the notion of the planets being at their highest power, or being the most powerful, and they’re associating the exact degrees of the angles and these astronomical points, when they’re at their most visible, in some sense, as being also their most powerful.

LS: Yeah, definitely, that would make sense.

CB: Yeah, it does make sense, it’s pretty straightforward, but what’s interesting about that is then we start to really understand where this debate about house division came from. And there’s a bit of an issue because, and this is what I’ll get into it some point later in the house division talk, is that there’s different, equally valid arguments for why the quadrant house Midheaven has astronomical and symbolic importance, but also why the equal house and the whole sign house Midheaven have their own independent symbolic importance, because the equal house Midheaven, which is always in the 10th whole sign house is the highest point on the ecliptic. Let me put that another way, because astrologers aren’t used to, unfortunately, the term ecliptic. The equal house Midheaven and the 10th whole sign house Midheaven, essentially, or the sign, those are the highest spot in the zodiac at any one time. Whereas when a planet hits the degree of the quadrant house Midheaven, that’s when it hits its highest elevation. So we have a difference in importance, symbolically, between the planets being at their highest elevation, versus the signs of the zodiac being at their highest elevation, and sort of seeing how each of those could have its own independent not just validity but like symbolic significance. How a planet being in its highest point might be symbolically significant, versus the sign of the zodiac that’s at its highest point when a person is born also having some symbolic significance, and why there’s ambiguity, then, about people wanting to say, “This one’s more important,” or “This one’s more important,” when they both might have importance in some sense. And that’s some of the core of why the house division argument becomes so tense. It’s because both sides have valid points of view, that are valid to some extent, and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. But because each side has seen it working, because they both see parts of that work in some way, they think the other side must be wrong. And nobody’s figured out how to synthesize those two yet.

LS: Yeah, for sure.

CB: Alright, was that a long enough digression? [laughing]

LS: [laughing] I know, I think that’s a really valid point, that you should go into in the other podcast.

CB: Alright, and I will. But, it’s such a crucial piece of this–

LS: No, definitely,

CB: –because this truly is, and that’s why I want to have a long digression on it. I’m not going to pretend as if it’s the entirety of the reason for the house division debate. And it’s not the only independent reason for each system of house division, which may have other origins that feed into this, but definitely textually, that’s one of the arguments that I feel I can make very strongly and I think is very clear at this point, is this is part of where the house division debate comes from, is going back to the source text of Petosiris, and the calculation of the predominator, and the length of life technique, and the later generations of astrologers drawing on that, and trying to interpret that, and sometimes coming to different conclusions about it. Alright? Alright.

LS: [laughing] I completely agree and we’re tracking to have a four-hour podcast.

CB: Are we really? How long…?

LS: Well, I don’t know. I don’t have my phone in front of me.

CB: We are one hour and twenty-two minutes.

LS: Okay.

CB: Alright, we will keep going.

LS: [laughing] Okay.

CB: Alright, so at this point I want to move into some examples from Porphyry because Porphyry doesn’t just outline that stuff abstractly, but he actually gives us some examples of how it works, which is pretty cool.

Alright, so here are the examples from Porphyry. He says if you have a chart where the Sun is in the first house. And, again, this is presumably using either quadrant houses or equal houses. I have it just, as a diagram here set up so that it almost looks like it’s using whole-sign houses, but let’s just say, for the sake of argument, just to remember… Because part of it is that there’s such ambiguity, that I want to be careful about it. I do tend to think that it was probably quadrant houses that was intended, but that’s an interpretation of mine, and that’s also following the route that Valens went in this, where he introduces Porphyry houses. But I still want to leave that a little bit ambiguous because we can’t say for sure, because we don’t have the original source text, and we don’t know the intentions of those authors, and obviously, even the ancient authors debated this.

Anyway, Porphyry says if the Sun is in the first house and it’s a day chart, which would mean, the Sun would have to be either, basically, exactly conjunct the Ascendant, or just above the degree of the Ascendant, but still interpreted as if it’s in the first house using quadrant houses – then the Sun is the predominator just automatically.

LS: That makes sense.

CB: Does that make sense?

LS: Yeah, definitely.

CB: Because it’s angular, because it’s in the first house which is one of the angular houses, the angular houses are first, fourth, seventh, and 10th. So it’s angular, it’s…

LS: It’s the sect light.

CB: It’s the sect light, because it’s the day chart, so the Sun is preferred in a day chart. And finally, it’s literally the most east it can get, because it’s in the first house and it’s conjunct the Ascendant which is associated with East. So, it fits all three criteria, so it’s just automatically, regardless of where else the Moon is in the chart, doesn’t matter because the Sun would be the predominator in this instance.

LS: Right, yeah, and this is going to be like, the easiest example because this is very clear cut.

CB: Right. The next example that Porphyry gives is he says if it’s a night chart and the Moon is in the first house – then the Moon is automatically a predominator. So, basically, the same rationale, but just reversed. In this one we don’t know where the Sun is, we just know that it would have to be somewhere in the bottom half of the chart, low enough below the Ascendant-Descendant axis, so that it’s not, we’re running into the twilight issue. So it’s definitely a night chart. Let’s say, if the Sun was in the fourth house or the fifth house, it would definitely be a night chart and the Moon would be the predominator.

The next example Porphyry gives, he says, if you have a day chart, where the Sun is in the ninth house, while the Moon is either in the first or second house, then the Moon is the predominator. In this case, what’s interesting…Two things we can tell about the Moon is that the Moon is more angular, because it’s in either an angular house (the first house), or in a succedent house, the succedent houses being the second, fifth, eighth, and 11th, and those two houses, an angular or succedent house, are more angular, more close to an angle, or rising up towards an angle, than the Sun in a cadent house in the ninth, the cadent house is being the third, sixth, ninth, and 12th. What’s interesting in this case is, that angularity and being more Eastern actually trumps the sect of the chart. So it’s like, despite the fact that it’s a day chart, and the Sun is of the sect in favor, that doesn’t seem to win out over being more Eastern and being more angular. And that’s actually interesting, because one of the recurring themes, that we’ll notice through the rest of the examples that Porphyry gives, is that sect seems to be the lowest of the factors to take into account, and angularity seems to be the primary factor, that they take into account the most, or that they put the most emphasis on, which is interesting, and again, goes back to and is important in terms of the whole issue of house division and using some degree-based form of house division within the context of this technique.

The next example that Porphyry gives is he says if you have a night chart, where the Moon is in the ninth house, and the Sun is in the second house, then the Sun is the predominator.

LS: Is that the right slide for it?

CB: Uh, no. There we go, okay there it is. Thanks.

LS: Mhm.

CB: Night chart. Moon in the ninth house, Sun in the second house. The Sun becomes the predominator. So, again, it’s kind of like an extension of the logic that we saw in the previous example where the Sun is more angular, because it’s in a succedent house, which is better than the Moon being in a cadent house, or what’s also called a declining house. That’s why it says “decline”, that’s what “cadent” means, is “declining”.

LS: Well, and it’s interesting in this one with something with the ninth versus the second, because the ninth is normally thought of as more of a good house, than I feel like, maybe the second, you know, in other ways.

CB: Right, the ninth aspects, by a trine, the first house and Ascendant, whereas the second house doesn’t make a major aspect of the first house, so that it’s sometimes almost considered to be one of the “challenging” or the “bad” houses.

LS: Right, or at least a not great house. So it’s interesting that really what seems to be being prioritized here is that the planet is about to rise, or something like that.

CB: Yeah, it really, like angularity, over and over again, as you go through the examples, seems to be their primary criteria for this, which really just goes back to, then, and emphasizes why either quadrant houses or equal houses were introduced at this point within the context of this technique because they’re really emphasizing angularity, and that must have been one of the major things that the ancient sources really understood and took from reading the text, even if it was ambiguous, that it’s really focused on angularity in this context. Whereas the doctrine that you’re talking about, about the good and bad houses is almost more based on whole-sign houses and sign-based aspects, in terms of which houses aspect, or will always aspect the rising sign.

LS: Right, exactly.

CB: And that dictating which houses are good and bad, so that the houses that aspect through a major aspect the first house are like the third, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, 10th, 11th – all of those aspect the first house and therefore signify good things. Whereas the houses that don’t aspect the first house, the second, sixth, eighth, and 12th, signify more negative or challenging things.

LS: Right.

CB: Which, using sign-based aspects and whole-sign houses, that makes sense, and it’s logical and relatively, straightforward. But using quadrant houses, it doesn’t quite make sense, because the houses can shift and distort, so that certain houses are not always aspecting other houses.

LS: Yeah, definitely.

CB: In that framework, angularity makes more sense, because you do have planets rising up towards or declining away from certain angles.

LS: Right.

CB: And that notion of rising up towards or moving away from is key to the idea of angularity. But using the other approach of good and bad houses seems to be more tied into that sign-based framework.

LS: Yeah, definitely.

CB: This, again, explains some of the ambiguity of and some of the… what the hell happened with the house division issue in ancient astrology is, we had different competing frameworks that were getting merged together, but were sometimes coming at it from different reference systems that weren’t fully compatible, or that had incompatibilities or inconsistencies.

Alright, so that’s that example. So next example, because he keeps going through a few examples, and they’re useful, because they illustrate the point, and once you’ve gone through enough of the examples, you can get the gist of it and apply it to the rest of the possibilities from there. So the next one, Porphyry says if the Sun and Moon are below the horizon, thus it’s a night chart. If the Moon, he says, is in an angular or succedent house, then the Moon is predominator. This would pretty much then just be, if the Sun is in the fourth house, making it a night chart, and the Moon is either in the fourth or the fifth house, then the Moon’s the predominator. That’s pretty straightforward, where sect is playing a more significant role, right?

LS: Right, yeah. And the Moon could be in the second, too, right? In theory.

CB: Yeah, there’s a little bit of ambiguity there, so I didn’t add that, but yes, the Moon theoretically, I think, in this one.. Because he doesn’t say “fourth or fifth”, I think he says “angular, succedent”, so I tried to make a diagrams that would reflect more the one that was absolutely clear.

LS: Right, sure.

CB: Alright, and in the next example he says if both luminaries are under the earth, thus it’s automatically going to be a night chart, but the Sun is angular, and the only way– or the main way that would work is if it was in the fourth house, and the Moon was in a cadent house, and the two cadent houses that are blow horizon are the third house and the sixth house, then, he says, the Sun would be the predominator. This is a nice contrast with the previous example, where we got one where the Moon wins out; this is one where the Sun can win out in a night chart, even if it’s in the fourth house, which is essentially right in the middle of the night, where you would otherwise consider the Moon to be in her greatest power in terms of sect. But here, it’s like the angularity of the Sun wins out over the cadency of the Moon.

LS: Right.

CB: So, again, just re-emphasizing that whatever ancient author came up with this source, I guess, the Petosiris text, really was hyper-focused on angularity within this context.

LS: Right.

CB: Alright, and then finally I think there’s one last example, and he says, “If you have a day chart where the Sun and the Moon are both cadent in the ninth house, thus both luminaries are cadent, then the Ascendant becomes the predominator.” So, the final thing I get from this final example is that cadency is seen as so problematic within the context of this technique that anytime both luminaries are cadent the Ascendant automatically becomes the predominator. So, then you default the Ascendant, and the Ascendant becomes a predominator.

LS: Right.

CB: So that’s the predominator, and that’s pretty much how the predominator is calculated. And you can pretty much summarize that or put that together pretty simply with a few basic rules, that Porphyry summarizes. I have broken it down into simple statements here, which is that in general, the predominator is the luminary that is more angular, primarily – angularity is the most important key one. The one that is more eastern, towards the left side of the chart versus the right side of the chart. And then third, and evidently the least important consideration but still taken into account, is the one that is more in accord with the sect of the chart, which is the Sun in the day chart, or the Moon in the night. But that, ultimately angularity is so important that regardless of being eastern or western, and regardless of sect, if both luminaries are cadent, in a cadent house, then the Ascendant is automatically the predominator.

LS: That makes sense. Do you think if there’s a tie, that sect wins out?

CB: If there’s a tie…

LS: Yeah, if they’re equally angular, and equally…

CB: I think, that was the one that…

LS: …Eastern,

CB: I’m trying to think if there’s something I’m missing, but I’m pretty sure that that’s the point of the fourth house example, where they were both, they said if the sun is in the fourth and the moon is either in the fourth or the fifth, then the Sun becomes predominator.

LS: No, this one the moon, right?

CB: I’m sorry, yes, yes. The Moon becomes predominator. That’s an instance to me where sect, they’re equal for the most part, they’re both angular in the fourth house, but because they’re both below the horizon that means it’s a night chart. That’s the instance when they’re both equal in terms of angularity, where they basically have to be in the same house in order for that to work, in order for the sect to be one way and for them to both be in the same house – that’s when sect becomes the deciding factor. But that’s a kind of a rare case.

LS: Sure.

CB: Or somewhat rare. Does that make sense?

LS: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don’t know if you want me to go further or move on with that, cause I’m starting to –

CB: No, I mean if you have any thoughts.

LS: Yeah, just it made me think of if they’re equally, say, both succedent or both angular then do you deal with the specific degrees of angularity. or away from the Ascendant, or something like that?

CB: That is a fine question, unfortunately, our source texts do not tell us. So, that’s one of those lovely open-ended questions that the ancient astrologers themselves ran into in dealing with, and wrestling with this doctrine, which is what form of house division should we use? The source text is not clear. We’ve got to come to our own conclusions, and different astrologers evidently came to different conclusions, which created competing and variant traditions. That’s basically exactly what’s going to happen today, and that’s what’s already happening with the revival of ancient astrology.

And that’s one of the funny things about the revival of ancient astrology, is one of the things that always happens. It has happened many times historically, and it’s already starting to happen again today in the past 20 or 30 years since the revival of ancient astrology started is that in reviving the texts, and in trying to interpret them, astrologers sometimes come to different conclusions, either based on textual analysis or based on trying to put the principles into practice and running into an issue, where there’s different ways that you could go with something from a practical standpoint. Once you actually read the text that sounds straightforward, but then when you put it into practice, there’s some ambiguity, where it could go one way or another and you have to make a choice.

LS: Right.

CB: And some astrologers are naturally going to go one way, and other astrologers are going to go another. And it will create variant traditions, or variant schools. Some of those schools will become more popular, and some of those schools will not, for reasons that sometimes have to do with practicality, or with efficacy of what works better, but not always. Sometimes it’s just the text that becomes more popular sometimes through chance, or happenstance, or other circumstances because it was promoted better, that’s the variant that will survive and become more popular with future generations. And the other one will sometimes die out completely, or sometimes will only be passed along by certain astrologers, who may or may not have the correct approach, or at least believe that they do, despite whatever the majority thinks.

LS: Sure.

CB: And lots of other funny things that we could get into about the history and transmission of astrology.

LS: Right.

CB: That was a good example of that.

LS: Thank you. [chuckles]

CB: What’s funny about this, of course – So we’ve gone through all of this at this point, on this talk on the Master of the Nativity – still don’t know how to calculate the Master the Nativity.

LS: [laughing]

CB: [laughing] All of that was for finding the predominator.

LS: Right, that was the preliminary preface.

CB: Right, finding the predominator is the preliminary step for finding the Master of the Nativity. The good news, at this point, is that luckily finding the Master of the Nativity, once you’ve found the predominator, is actually pretty straightforward.

According to Porphyry, the first method, or the first variant tradition, for finding the Master of the Nativity is, he says, that once you find the predominator, you can then find the Master. And then he reports that there’s two approaches to doing this. He says, “According to the first approach” – and because he gives this approach first, some scholars, I can’t remember who, I don’t know if it was Schmidt or if it was one of the academics speculated, I think probably rightly, that the first approach he gives is probably the older approach because he would usually, theoretically, just based on the usual protocols of ancient authors, they would probably give the most ancient and authoritative one first, and then the more recent, or less authoritative, or maybe even the variant one that they prefer, second.

The first one that he gives, which is presumably the older approach, is he says, “Once you find the predominator, the Master of the Nativity is the domicile lord of the predominator.” So, what that means, in other words, the traditional planet that rules the entire zodiacal sign that the predominator is located in, becomes the Master of the Nativity. Another way to put that is, basically just, the planet that rules the sign of the zodiac that the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant is located in, depending on which one is the predominator once you’ve calculated that, becomes the overall ruler of the chart, or the Master of the Nativity.

So, of course, within this context, since we’re talking about ancient astrology two thousand years ago, we’re using the traditional rulerships, where Saturn rules Aquarius, and Jupiter rules Pisces, and Mars rules Scorpio.

LS: Right.

CB: For those not familiar with that. Yeah, so that’s it. That’s the first approach to finding the Master of the Nativity. You’ve got to go through a lot of work, and there’s some ambiguity in terms of finding the predominator. And in some charts it’s going to be more straightforward, in other charts there might be more ambiguity. But, once you’ve done all of that work, it’s pretty straightforward to find the Master of the Nativity.

When I first came across this doctrine, and I’ve been thinking about it for years now, there’s a few interesting implications that just automatically come up once you get to this point. One of the ones that I find the most fascinating is, that it implies, that many people born during the day may end up being more characterized by their Sun sign. In the instances where sect ends up being the determining factor. Whereas conversely, many people born at night might end up being more characterized by their Moon sign, but not always. As we saw, sect was the least important of the three conditions, and really angularity and the directionality emphasis were emphasized much, much more and those are much more, not random but variable type conditions.

It’s kind of interesting, though, because it means – One of the things that’s really interesting to me, that I always think about at this point, is when it comes to modern astrology over the past century and what it’s turned into with Sun sign astrology, one of the things that’s interesting about this doctrine of the Master of the Nativity, to me if it works, and if it’s a valid doctrine to any extent, is that it could explain why some people really resonate strongly with their Sun Sign. And there’s some people where they take astrology really seriously from the start because it really does resonate with them in their life and some of those people, it may be because their Sun sign and the ruler of that sign is actually the Master of their Nativity. Therefore, their life would be more dominated by the qualities, or the characteristics, or the symbolism of that zodiacal sign. Whereas there may be some people who don’t resonate with their Sun sign as much – and it would be because maybe the Moon sign and its ruler is the Master of their Nativity, or their rising sign and its ruler are the Master of their Nativity.

LS: Right, so it just kind of shifts the proportion or emphasis on different pieces of the chart. It’s always going to be the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant, so one of the “big three”. But, you know, everyone’s still going to have a Sun Sign and that will still matter to some extent. But, what you’re saying is that for some people the Sun sign will matter a lot more than the average person, or the next person.

CB: Yeah, I mean the implication, for me that’s really interesting is, on the one hand, it validates some piece of Sun sign astrology, in that, it explains why some people really do resonate strongly with their horoscope column or their Sun Sign. And in some ways that validates that for them, and we could almost have means of determining why that is for certain people. But, on the other hand, it also goes against Sun Sign astrology, and it almost brings up what is already the classic objection that astrologers, especially once they get into astrology. Everyone goes through this phase, or people often go through a phase of initially being very almost disdainful of Sun Sign astrology because once you get into advanced real natal astrology that casts a full birth chart, you realize how simplistic Sun Sign astrology is, in some way, because there are all those other planets, aspects, houses, transits, synastry, and all these other things, that make astrology really complicated. And when you compare that to Sun-sign astrology, where it’s just you’re one of 12 signs and that’s it, that looks overly simplistic.

This, almost by comparison, when you look at how complicated this doctrine is, almost makes Sun Sign astrology look even more simplistic, on the other side of the argument because if you realize that you have to go through all these hoops in order to calculate the predominator, and that’s the one that’s going to tell you which one is the more dominant luminary, or if it’s the Ascendant, then you realize it’s actually even more complicated than astrologers know about, to begin with. Where the Sun, Moon, and Rising aren’t even on equal footing in any way, but instead there’s one of them that might really stand out in the person’s life and the planetary ruler of that sign, itself, becomes the overall ruler of the chart. It adds a whole new dimension to the entire process of doing natal astrology, that’s a little bit underexplored at this point in time.

The closest approximation that astrologers have to it, is some lingering knowledge of this with astrologers using the ruler of the Ascendant, and modern astrologers sometimes calling that the Ruler of the Chart. That’s the last vestiges of this doctrine that survive in modern astrology, is modern astrologers referring to the ruler of the ascendant as the ruler of the chart. That’s partially coming out of the horary tradition and the electional tradition, where the ruler of the Ascendant is important and is the primary significator of the querent or the initiator. It’s also partially the last vestiges of this doctrine, where the ruler of the Ascendant is one of the candidates for the overall Master of the Chart.

LS: It’s interesting because in this one the ruler the Ascendant is the least likely to be the candidate.

CB: Right, it’s like the default.

LS: It’s the fallback.

CB: The fallback, yeah. I think there’s another term for that but I can’t think of what it is. The back-up.

LS: The backup option, yeah. I’m used to, at least, thinking about the ruler of the Ascendant as really primary in a chart. So it’s interesting to look at it from this vantage point, where the ruler of the Ascendant wouldn’t very often be the candidate here. It would be only if the Sun and the Moon were both cadent.

CB: Yeah, and hold that thought because that’s going to come up when we get to the second variant of the Master of the Nativity. But, yeah, that is important. Lots of interesting thoughts, lots of interesting research. And part of the– I want to mention two things really quickly that I forgot to mention earlier.

One of them is that part of this presentation is to present this doctrine as intact as I can based on my research, so that people can then go out and start applying it. And I’m not going to try to pretend that I have this all worked out. Because a large part of my approach over the past decade is, on the one hand, and the approach of many traditional astrologers, is there’s a difference between, on the one hand, recovering and trying to reconstruct what the ancient texts say, and recover the doctrines as best as we can, and sometimes that takes work to finesse, and reconstruct what the authors were trying to say, or what the original authors intended. And then the second part is applying that in practice and seeing what works out best, empirically, in our opinions.

LS: Definitely.

CB: And that’s a whole separate thing. And the piece of this that I’m trying to present in this lecture, is primarily just this is my best understanding in trying to reconstruct this doctrine, how they calculated, and what they were trying to do with it. And then go out and do what you will with this, and research this, because this is a recently recovered concept, these are some of the implications that I’ve seen. I will get into a few charts, so we’ll see a little bit of empirical stuff, but not a ton, because it’s primarily just trying to present it without imposing too many interpretations on it yet, and instead, leaving that for the community to start to work with in the future.

LS: Yeah, and that’s really important that you say that because I know that sometimes people listen to the podcast and they take what you’re talking about as the word of how you should practice. So, it is important to be clear that this is more of a recovered thing to play with.

CB: Yeah, exactly. The other thing I meant to mention is, I partially shortened the title to “The Master of the Nativity”, because I figured that was a cooler phrase, and because I figured it’s more… one of the issues with translation conventions, I think, is picking something that could be used in practice and is not too clunky. And I think “The House Master of the Nativity” sounds kind of dorky, and I’m not sure also that originally as important, the idea of the “house” itself, it was more the idea of the Master of the House or the… It’s not just the Master, but also the Mistress of the house, there’s another term for that. But in Roman society the head of the household. And it’s not the house that’s as important, it’s the idea of the one who’s in charge of the entire thing, and almost like the chart itself being a house, and you have a bunch of planets that are living under one roof and the question of who’s in charge? And it’s the Master; the Master of the House is the one that’s in charge.

LS: Right.

CB: I just wanted to clarify that.

LS: I still think you should play that song. [laughing]

CB: I don’t know the song so that’s not as funny…Afterwards you can play it.

LS: Definitely.

CB: I do have a little example chart, really quickly, that I want to throw up. This is the chart of T.S. Eliot. It’s a timed chart. He has something like 25° of Libra rising. I set the chart using quadrant houses, I think using the Porphyry house system, although the Midheaven is such that there’s not going to be huge variations here, depending on what system of the house division you use in terms of quadrant houses, and even equal is actually going to be a little bit close here, because the Midheaven is at the very end of Cancer, like 29° Cancer, it looks like, while the Ascendant is at 25° Libra.

Nonetheless, in quadrant houses, in Porphyry houses especially, the Sun is at 3° of Libra, which makes it in the 12th house in quadrant houses and therefore it is cadent in quadrant houses. So, even though it’s in the first whole-sign house, it’s cadent in quadrant houses, because it’s moving away from the angle, it’s moving away from the Ascendant and it’s sufficiently removed from the Ascendant, that it’s not within that 5° range, so we wouldn’t really consider it to be conjunct the Ascendant by degree. Instead it’s falling away from the angle, and therefore cadent.

The Moon is at 14° Gemini and that is actually a succedent house according to quadrant houses. As a result of that, even though it’s a day chart, and even though the Sun is more eastern, I believe in this instance, because the Sun is cadent and the Moon is succedent – that they would treat the Moon as the predominator.

According to the first variant, that Porphyry gave us for determining the Master of the Nativity, because the Moon is in Gemini, and Gemini is ruled by Mercury, so Mercury becomes the Master of the entire Nativity. Mercury, interestingly enough, is conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, it’s at 26° of Libra, and also separating from a conjunction with Venus at 24° Libra, and they’re both clustered around just the degree of the Ascendant at about 24-25° Libra.

T.S. Eliot, of course, is a famous American poet and he actually won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 for his poetry. So, arguably, we can already see that Mercury is an important, or prominent planet in this chart because it’s conjunct the Ascendant, but what this is telling us, with this doctrine, is that Mercury is actually the Master of the Nativity. So in some ways, it’s highlighting it even more, than it already was, and maybe telling us to pay more attention. If we were sitting down and trying to interpret this person’s chart, we might be able to with this doctrine say, that that Mercury is going to be even more prominent, and somehow the mercurial themes, that have to do with communication or writing, could come to be dominant themes in this person’s life. And if you were to even say a statement as simple as that, based on this doctrine, that would turn out to be a surprisingly prescient statement, in retrospect later in this person’s life. Right?

LS: Yeah, definitely.

CB: Okay. Any questions about that?

LS: Mmm, no, I don’t think so.

CB: Let’s see here, next example: Salvador Dali. It’s a day chart, the Sun is in the top half of the chart. The Sun is in a succedent house according to quadrant houses, it’s in the 11th house according to Porphyry. The Moon however is angular because it’s actually conjunct the degree of the quadrant Midheaven. But despite that, despite the angularity, the sect, and the fact that the Sun is more eastern over towards the left side of the chart, I think would make the Sun the predominator in this instance.

LS: Mmm, yeah.

CB: Again, you might make arguments different ways and there’s ambiguities, but the Sun, I think, would become the predominator in this instance. The Sun is in Taurus, so the ruler of Taurus would become the Master of the Nativity. And Venus in his chart is in Taurus, in its own sign, in the 10th house by quadrant, or the 11th whole-sign house. And of course, Salvador Dali became a famous artist, and a famous painter especially. Again, it could stand out or could point to a planet as being more prominent, or more important, in the person’s life and chart than it might otherwise look like.

LS: Right.

CB: Alright, so that’s that example. And just one more for the heck of it. Here’s Linda Goodman’s chart, who’s a famous astrologer. She had the Ascendant at 22° of Libra and the Sun was at 19° of Aries. That means the Sun was conjunct the Ascendant and it’s just barely above the degree of the Ascendant, which means it’s a day chart. Remember back to the very first example Porphyry gave, that means the Sun is automatically the predominator. That’s actually an interesting instance, is that when the Sun is rising in a day chart conjunct the Ascendant, the Sun and the Ascendant are obviously both in the same signs so that automatically the ruler of both the Sun sign and the Ascendant sign becomes the predominator, which is kind of interesting in terms of the overlap there.

LS: Yeah, definitely.

CB: She had Aries rising, and the Sun was in Aries, so the predominator is the Sun, and Mars becomes the Master of the Nativity. Mars is actually in Gemini and it’s in the third whole-sign house, and she ended up being the author of the highest-selling astrology book of all time, at least in modern times. There’s a little bit of ambiguity about if it’s the highest-selling compared to Ptolemy because we don’t have Ptolemy’s numbers exactly and certainly, we know that it’s been translated into a lot of languages, and reprinted, and translated, and yadda yadda yadda. But Linda Goodman’s book Sun signs that came out in 1968 just sold millions and millions and millions of copies. So in terms of a single book in a single language, and in a very short span of time, that book sold a ton of copies and it was also in the modern era where you could print copies of books much more easily versus ancient texts where they had to be copied by hand. But you get the point otherwise, that Mars there, again, becomes very prominent and is playing a very prominent role in her chart in the third house, and she ends up writing a hugely, highly-selling astrology book.

Those are my three examples for that initial approach to the Master of the Nativity. One of the things to bring up at this point is that the Master of the Nativity seems to come up a lot when they talked about– The question now is once you’ve calculated the Master of the Nativity, what do you do with it, what’s the purpose? We’ve seen a few examples, where we have some suggestive things in modern times. But what did they do with it, and what did they think it was for? It turns out that part of what they seem to have done with the Master of the Nativity is they often connected it with character analysis. And in Rhetorius– cause one of the differences, of course, with modern and ancient astrology is that modern astrology is often, since the work of Alan Leo and everywhere after that, is much more focused on character analysis and astrology in some schools becomes almost entirely about character analysis and psychology, and stuff like that, right?

LS: Yeah.

CB: Modern astrology, to some extent, in some schools, is almost exclusively that, and there’s some schools that say that that’s all you’re supposed to do with astrology or that’s all astrology is capable of, or that’s all it’s for. And that’s one of the real differences when you go back in ancient astrology, because when you read the ancient texts it’s like they’re trying to make concrete statements about concrete events that will happen in the person’s life.

LS: Rather than, like, how you subjectively will perceive that area of your life, or something.

CB: Yeah, like how you’ll feel about it, or how you’ll react, or how you’ll do emotionally with that, or the type of people that you emotionally might be attracted to, or careers that you might gravitate towards or something like that. The ancient texts are more specific, like “you will do this” or whatever.

LS: Yeah.

CB: What’s funny, though, is the one instance where that’s not the case. The one exception to that rule is when it comes to the Master of the Nativity, because it’s within the context of the Master of the Nativity that they actually – the ancient astrologers – deviate from that and really do start talking about character analysis. And it’s often only once they get to the discussion about the Master of the Nativity that some of the astrologers do start talking about the native’s character in some sense.

This seems to be connected with this metaphysical concept that existed in the ancient world surrounding the concept of the daimon, or the native’s Guardian Spirit, which has this kind of long history going back to Plato and Socrates and then was also existing and different Egyptian traditions, where they had the belief in different spirits and things like that and there’s some weird overlaps between ancient Greek philosophy and philosophical conceptions of the guardian spirit, and then some other, including some magical traditions, where this comes up in some Egyptian traditions.

I’ve talked a little bit about that with Dorian Greenbaum on a past episode of the podcast. I can’t remember what episode that was, but it was the one about the rediscovery of an ancient horoscope a couple of years ago and she’s done a lot of interesting work on that. But the long and short of it, or the concise version of it, is essentially the notion that each soul is assigned a guardian spirit before birth and that the guardian spirit somehow influences and informs character traits throughout the life. And specifically that one of the roles of the guardian spirit is that it was said to direct the life or push the native towards their destiny, which was set by Fate, which in Greek is heimarmenē. That seems to have been part of the role of the daimon, and it’s almost like some of the last modern echoes of it are almost the Christian conceptualization of a little angel on your shoulder or little devil on your shoulder telling you what to do and pushing you in a certain direction, is almost similar to how they seem to treat the guardian spirit in some ways. In influencing the person and molding their character in some broader sense.

LS: Right.

CB: Except, a little bit more than that, actually that’s almost putting it down lower in importance than it was, because they seem to have taken this almost as being overwhelmingly important, and almost as a dominant factor in the life.

I have this great quote from Iamblichus. The ancient philosopher Iamblichus from around the fourth century or so. He was a contemporary of Porphyry, and in one of his texts, he has this statement about the guardian spirit where he says, “…the soul descends into incarnation, and there is apportioned to us an individual lot.” And he goes on later, I cut some stuff out, “This spirit [the daimōn], then, stands as a model for us. […] When a soul has selected a spirit as its guide, then straightaway it stands over it as the fulfiller of the various levels of life of the soul, and as the soul descends into the body it binds to the body, and it supervises the composite living being arising from it, and personally regulates the particulars of the life of the soul; and all our reasonings we pursue thanks to the first principles which it communicates to us and we perform such actions as it puts into our minds[…]”

Maybe I shouldn’t overstate the modern analogy of the devil and angel. That’s like vaguely, sort of related. But this is– this conceptualization is obviously much more major, in the sense of this being an overwhelmingly important influence, in shaping the person’s life, in making sure that the person goes through with and ends up fulfilling their destiny, and also in influencing the natives character traits and pushing them in the direction of certain character traits rather than others.

That was from a philosophical text. Here’s a quote from Rhetorius and this is what I was talking about when I was talking about astrologers starting to talk about character analysis when they get to the Master of the Nativity. This is a passage from Rhetorius, who lived in the sixth or seventh century and was one of the last major Hellenistic astrologers. He’s talking about when Venus is the Master of the Nativity, he says, “When this star [Venus] has the rulership of the Nativity and a nocturnal chart, and when it is effective in its own domiciles or rising in sect, it will make handsome persons, witty cleanly, illustrious, religious, loving tenderly, successful, esteemed with praise by the people, or they stand out in appearance, wearing gold […] wealthy, noted […] those who are done well for by women […]”

This is from Holden’s translation of Rhetorius’ Compendium. There you can see he’s stating some circumstantial stuff in terms of circumstances, but he’s also saying character analysis stuff. They’ll be witty, they’ll be clean, they’ll be loving tenderly, and so on and so forth.

LS: Right.

CB: So, this is where the ancient astrologers start drawing in character analysis when they have established the Master of the Nativity, one, because they’re treating that planet as having a dominant role in the entire chart but also, probably, because of this background belief, potentially, that the Master of the Nativity was somehow connected with the guardian spirit. And due to their belief that the guardian spirit is there to help ratify, and ensure the native fulfills their destiny, but also the guardian spirit is somehow influencing character traits as well.

Interestingly enough, since we get the technical conceptualization of how to calculate the Master of the Nativity from Porphyry, Porphyry actually had a really famous debate with Iamblichus, where they debated and talked about the Master of the Nativity. In this text from Porphyry known as the “Letter to Anebo”, he actually mentions the Master of the Nativity and he says explicitly that some people use the Master of the Nativity in order to identify the guardian spirit, or the daimon. So evidently, Porphyry– we only have only fragments of this text and most of them actually only survived through a response that Iamblichus wrote to Porphyry. So, we have to infer some of what Porphyry wrote based on Iamblichus quoting, and sometimes just replying to him, and we have to infer what Porphyry must have said.

But, Porphyry seems to have said that some people used the Master of the Nativity doctrine so they could identify the guardian spirit and then by identifying the guardian spirit, they would then use it to actually invoke, through some ceremonies or rituals, their guardian spirit and ask it to be their protector, and to actually make a request of the guardian spirit to help free them from the power of fate. So that somehow, according to Porphyry, some people, either some astrologers or some philosophers or whoever thought, that if you calculated the Master of the Nativity, you could use it to find the guardian spirit and if you could use it to find the guardian spirit, you could ask the guardian spirit to free you from whatever your fate is.

Because, of course, as the title of my book states Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, available in fine bookstores everywhere, one of the main thesis of my book is that Hellenistic astrology was originally conceptualized as the study of fate, and that calculating a birth chart and the positions of the planets the moment of your birth, said something about your fate but also, in some extreme versions, was the determiner of your fate in some sense, and the determiner of the events that would or would not happen in your life, like the different topics of the chart, like marriage, wealth, career, success, friends, what have you, and whether those things would happen or not, and whether those things would go well or not, and so on and so forth.

So Iamblichus has gotten to this whole famous debate with Porphyry over this, that’s documented in the book that survives from Iamblichus called On the Mysteries or On the Mysteries of the Egyptian Religions, where Iamblichus and Porphyry are going back and forth and arguing about this doctrine of the guardian spirit and the Master of the Nativity. And Iamblichus says, he responds to Porphyry and makes this counter argument, where he says that’s kind of absurd, because the birth chart itself and thus the Master of the Nativity, he argues, were allotted by fate. So therefore, if you can find the guardian spirit and talk to it, why would the guardian spirit free you from your fate, if the guardian spirit itself was given to you by fate. And he points out this logical inconsistency of that, and says that it doesn’t make any sense from a philosophical, or a metaphysical standpoint. And they have this whole interesting debate about that, that survives in this text called On the Mysteries.

LS: Right, and I mean, when I first encountered that idea, I was very sympathetic to it, because it’s like, yeah, that’s totally not logical. But I think, it depends on whether you think there’s any wiggle room in there, and also whether you think the guardian spirit has any autonomy to make such decisions.

CB: Right, does the guardian spirit have autonomy?

LS: Right, so both of those factors. Is there any wiggle room in your fate? Is it negotiable to any degree? Versus are the rough outlines there, but are the details negotiable?

CB: Right, well and that became one of the classic debates that we can see the astrologers having and we can see this in some of the philosophical texts, there were debates about whether fate was negotiable or whether everything was predetermined. And I talk about in chapter five or six of my book, how there was a whole range of different views that astrologers adopted and some of them thought that it was negotiable and others thought it was completely predetermined and that the chart says everything about your fate and the whole purpose of astrology is just to come to terms with your fate before it happens that way you can meet all events with equilibrium or without being thrown off by very positive things or very negative things.

LS: Right.

CB: But others didn’t, others thought there were ways to change your fate and sometimes this is where the magical traditions come in, this may have been where some of the electional traditions come in, and other things like that. And in fact in one of the magical texts that survives in the Greek papyrus magical texts, there is one spell where somebody had some astrological spell where, I think, they’re trying to invoke their Master of the Nativity, or the guardian spirit, and they’re asking it to free them from fate. So, clearly there were some people that the purpose of astrology for them, was not to accept their fate but to learn how to change it.

LS: Right, and I could see, this isn’t my own personal opinion on it, but I could see that if you thought that your guardian spirit was the most immediate connection to enforcing your faith, then you would at least want to be able to talk to them if you wanted to plead your case [chuckles] you know? Because they’d be the next one that you could talk to about it.

CB: Yes, it’s like because the daimons were viewed as spirits, they were intermediaries between mortals and between the gods essentially. And, the thing is I guess, if you’re approaching it from that metaphysical standpoint, if you can’t speak to the divine or you can’t speak the deities directly yourself, you can at least try to talk to the intermediaries and see if you can get them on your side.

LS: Exactly, they’re like the spiritual middle managers.

CB: Right, to see if you can basically bribe the, not the guards… Well in some ways, bribe the guard, basically. Because that’s what’s funny about the phrase, which is more of a later phrase, but I still like it. I know there’s some people that don’t like to translate the term ‘daimon’, they want to leave it transliterated, because it has a broad range of meanings and everything else, but it’s like, a daimon is a spirit entity of some sort and that’s why just saying “spirit” is sufficient for me and is a fine approximation of what the term meant in Greek. That a daimon is an interim, spirit intermediary, and in this context is acting as a sort of guardian spirit. But that’s one of the things that’s funny about it is in this context and the way they’re talking about it, it’s not just a guardian spirit in the sense that it’s there as a protector, which is almost more of the later Judeo-Christian, or more Christian, conceptualization of it, but it’s a guardian because it’s partially guarding to make sure that you fulfill your fate.

LS: Right.

CB: Which is both some positive things, let’s say, like meeting the love of your life, but also some negative things, like losing the love of your life, or what have you. So it’s a little tricky, because it’s guarding you potentially in a positive sense, but from a subjective standpoint, it could be in a more negative sense as well.  And that’s probably the thing that people are wanting to ask the guardian spirit to free them from, is the things that they view as being subjectively negative and that they don’t want to have to experience in their life. And so that’s why they would supplicate it in this way in order to see if they can get out of that.

That’s interesting. This is all taking place within a broader context, where astrology has been around for a few centuries, it’s been established as the means of studying fate, and the planets are the primary gatekeepers in establishing a person’s fate and influencing it. And then, interestingly, also we have other religions that grow out at this time, like Christianity, that start presenting an alternative means of escaping your fate, as well. So, it’s interesting seeing different, almost reactions to the cultural context of astrology in the way that it got tied into and almost trapped within the context of fate was then eventually different cultural reactionary movements out of that. Some of which are from the philosophical and magical traditions, where there’s like, traditions where they’re trying to come up with almost magical ways that you can escape your fate by negotiating with your guardian spirit. But, then there’s also other religions that are almost reacting to it, like Christianity, which are saying if you accept Christ and accept Christianity, then you can free yourself from your fate and your birth chart no longer applies to you. Which becomes one of the major things that, I think, in the early centuries was appealing about Christianity, which set it apart. And that was one of the most radical things that it did, and said, and claimed, that made it so popular so quickly, so that it eventually took over the Roman Empire.

LS: It’s a pretty good selling point. [laughs]

CB: It is, and that’s one of the things, over the past decade, that I– I spent 10 years writing my book, not because I couldn’t have written a book about the techniques of Hellenistic astrology the first year, that I started writing it because I could have written a pretty good overview and kind of did way back then, but I wanted to spend that 10 years studying more to understand the cultural context. And that was one of the coolest things, that I really started to get into was, eventually at one point, realizing how dominant over the culture astrology became in the first few centuries C.E., and how Christianity would have looked from that perspective and how fresh and liberating it would have looked from that perspective, if you’re coming from a cultural context in which astrology is telling you what your fate is, and telling you that your fate is sealed in some sense, and is not negotiable. So a religious movement that comes along and preaches liberation would have seemed really appealing to some people, especially if your fate wasn’t good, if you weren’t happy with your fate.

LS: Right, right.

CB: Maybe if you’re content with things, then you don’t have any reason to wrong rock the boat. But if you were born into, especially, let’s say poverty or something, then you don’t want to believe that that’s where you’re stuck for the rest of your life and there’s nothing you can do about it. You will be open to something if it’s telling you, you can have a radical departure from that.

LS: For sure, yeah. We could have a really interesting complete digression podcast on that alone. But it’s really interesting to see how, you know, we’re coming from the standpoint now of astrology being more of a fringe thing, that’s more popular lately, but it’s still a minority thing. It is not the dominant worldview.

CB: Well, it’s still a minority thing, and one of the things that’s interesting about modern astrology is, especially in the second half of the century, there was a radical break with, and rejection of, the idea of astrology and fate. And I think, that’s one of the things that’s also hard, and took me a while to understand Hellenistic astrology in that context and ancient traditional astrology because most of the past century of astrology has been so focused on humanism and being…not ideology, but a technique of liberation and achieving freedom and achieving your potential or becoming whatever you want that it’s almost divorced itself completely from any conceptualization of fate and gone almost in the opposite direction to an extreme.

LS: Yes, definitely.

CB: So, that it’s almost hard to conceptualize astrology as being something so different, because of where it’s at now or where it was until somewhat recently, until we had this whole revival of ancient astrology and now we have this intermingling of all these different ideas of fate and free will and magic. And that’s been a whole interesting thing that’s happened over the past year, or two, and other such threads.

LS: Right.

CB: Sorry for that long digression, but that’s one of the episodes I really want to do, and haven’t done yet, which is, there’s a few scholars that are really specialized in this and who’ve written books that are really cool, but I don’t know if I could ever get them to come on the show to have that kind of discussion but have done really interesting work on astrology and Christianity and how – it’s like, I don’t know if anyone’s fully made this argument. Some scholars have hinted at it and gone in that direction, but it’s really the role of astrology in, not motivating, but contributing to the rise of Christianity I feel is still a relatively under-explored area, but there’s been some interesting scholarship on it that I hope to do a show on at some point. So that is all I will say about that. Let’s take a brief break.

LS: Okay.

CB: Let’s transition now into talking about one of the other rulers of the charts. We have the Master of the Nativity which we’ve just – we’ve identified the predominator, the Master. But remember the third in order, that I mentioned, is the so-called Co-Master or the Joint Master of the Nativity. So, again, going back to Porphyry and according to Porphyry, he says there’s other rulers. The Co-Master of the Nativity… I have “Co-Master/Joint Master” since there’s different ways you can translate this term. It’s just sunoikodespotēs, and the sun- prefix means “co-” or “joint-”, so it means “together with”. So the closest analogy I could think of, in modern times, that’s straightforward, is the co-pilot of an airplane. Right?

LS: Yeah.

CB: You have your main pilot and you have your co-pilot.

According to the first tradition, that Porphyry outlines, the Co-Master of the Nativity is the bound lord of the predominator. So, we’re still using the predominator, we’ve calculated the predominator, and once we calculated the predominator, the Master of the Nativity is the domicile lord, the ruler of that entire sign, and then according to the same tradition, the Co-Master is the ruler of the bounds, or terms, or confines. Different traditional astrologers use different terms to refer to this but the terms, the bounds, or the confines are these unequal subdivisions of the signs, where they divide each of the signs up into five unequal sections, each of which is ruled by one of the five traditional planets. The five traditional planets, excluding the two luminaries, the Sun and the Moon.

For example, in the sign of Aries, the first five degrees is ruled by Jupiter, and those are the bounds of Jupiter. The next segment is ruled by Venus, the next segment after that’s ruled by Mercury, then Mars, and then Saturn. Those are the bounds. They’re more commonly referred to as the “terms”, but “terms” is kind of a weird phrase, and the term “bounds” or “confines” is a little bit closer to the original translation of the Greek term, horia. Make sense?

LS: Yeah, definitely makes sense.

CB: Okay. The most popular set of bounds is the Egyptian bounds. There were other approaches, like the Chaldean bounds, or Ptolemy came up with – evidently, he claims that he discovered it on his own, but most scholars think he actually just came up with it on his own, a system that made sense to him, and then attributed it to some ancient texts that he said that he found.

So there were several different approaches, or several different systems of bounds, of dividing up the signs into these subdivisions, that were floating around in ancient astrology. The most common or popular set was referred to as the Egyptian bounds, or that’s what Ptolemy calls them, and it’s usually assumed or usually believed that they’re called the Egyptian bounds, because that must have been the system that was outlined in the Nechepso and Petosiris texts, since those were said to be the “Egyptians.” Whoever wrote the Nechepso and Petosiris texts, they used pseudonyms, or pen names and published them as if they were being written by an ancient Egyptian king and an ancient Egyptian priest who worked together. If you read Valens, in the second century, he didn’t know any better, he was living in Egypt in the second century CE, but he seems to legitimately thought that Nechepso was actually a king, that lived at some point in the distant past, who practiced astrology. As far as we know, that didn’t happen. We just think, or scholars think that there was somebody in the first century BCE, or a little bit earlier, that wrote some foundational texts on astrology, attributed them to these two Egyptian figures for reasons that are unknown, there’s various speculations, and then those works were popularized and circulated widely.

One of the things they probably introduced was this set of subdivisions of the signs. And this is probably one of the reasons that those subdivisions of the signs were introduced, because they were integral to the technique or the concept of the Master of the Nativity. Because in this approach the Co-Master of the Nativity is determined by the lord of the bounds of the predominator.

One of the things that’s interesting about this is in this approach, the Co-Master can only be one of those five planets. It couldn’t be the Sun or Moon.

LS: Right.

CB: It could only be Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn, which is interesting in and of itself.

The term “bounds”, or “confines”, depending on how you translate it, is important because all the translations of the Greek term convey some idea of restrictions or limitations or keeping something held or restricted or in check. Right?

LS: Yes, it made me think of the whole daimon discussion, digression.

CB: Exactly, and what’s interesting is that the bounds or the confines came to be used in the length of life treatment especially. And this is, probably, partially where this whole technique gets tied into, in the later tradition, in authors like Valens and Ptolemy, they’re really talking about this within the context of trying to figure out the length of a person’s life. And the bound lord becomes important, the bound lord of the predominator, because it’s one of the ways that you establish how long the person will live by establishing which planet is their Co-Master, essentially.

We have the bounds according to the Egyptians. I do have a handout on my website, if you go to hellenisticastrology.com/bounds.pdf you can get a PDF that gives you a visual representation of the bounds of each of the signs. I also have another useful handout that’s available at hellenisticastrology.com/rulerships.pdf that will give you a different visual representation of the bounds, as well as the rulerships of the planets of all of the other dignities, so domicile, exaltation, triplicity, decans, bounds, and everything else.

This part of the technique really does veer us directly into the length of life technique, because using the bound lord of the predominator in some of the later authors, they really did seem to spend a lot of time… They bring that up a lot within the context of the length of life technique, basically.

In all of the later authors, and this ended up influencing the medieval tradition, and their whole use of their analogy from translating this into Arabic and Latin, was the Almuten, which just means “Predominator” or “Victor”. And then the… what do they call it?  They used some weird Latinized Arabic term and I’m forgetting what it was. Do you remember?

LS: For?

CB: When they talk about the length of life technique, they always talk about the…Oh yeah, it’s the Almuten and the Alcocoden.

LS: Oh, yeah.

CB: The Alcocoden – it just means “the ruler” or something like that. And the Alcocoden, the equivalent is this, it’s the bound lord of the predominator, is one of the approaches to determining the Alcocoden.

It’s the most common one in some authors, it’s the one that’s preferred first in the length of life treatment. I think, in Dorotheus, for example, and in Valens to a lesser extent. They prefer the bound lord of the predominator as one of the primary potential candidates for the length of life technique.

Alright, so again, the length of life technique probably goes back to Petosiris, and those are who the later authors like Valens, Ptolemy, Manetho, and others are drawing on for this.

The way that you’re supposed to use the length of life technique– I’ve never done an episode on this, because it’s a big topic and it’s also a tricky one, in modern times, to throw that out there.

LS: Sure, yeah.

CB: But to give you the gist of it; the gist of the length of life technique in most authors – with some slight variations – in ancient times, is that you’re supposed to basically calculate the predominator, then you use primary directions to direct the predominator through the zodiac at different rates. One of the rates is based on the ascensional times of the signs. Some signs are faster, and some signs are slower, but you basically direct the predominator, using a progression technique, until it reaches the rays of the malefics, and when it reaches an exact aspect with the malefic, especially a conjunction, square, or opposition, that was supposed to indicate a difficult time to the native’s vitality, which could result in death in some instances, if there’s no counteracting factors or mitigated indications.

That’s half of the length of life technique. The other half of the length of life technique is determining the Ruler of the Predominator, and in many instances or in some of the earliest authors, like Dorotheus, the bound lord of the predominator is preferred, and the planet that rules that, which if it’s the bound lords using the Egyptian terms/bounds, it’s going to be one of the five visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn. And each of those planets has a certain number of years associated with it, which is known as the greater years of the planets. What’s interesting about the greater years of the planets is that it’s actually the sum of the total number of bounds that are attributed to each of the planets. So that is the maximum number of years theoretically, if one of those planets is the Co-Master of the Nativity (or the bound lord of the predominator), that a person could live; best-case scenario if that planet is well placed.

These are the greater years associated with each planet. So Mercury is 76 years, the greater years of Venus is 82, Mars is 66, Jupiter is 79. and Saturn is 57. Note the lower number of years, relatively speaking, for the two malefics, and the higher number for the two benefics.

LS: Mmhmm, definitely.

CB: Those are the greater periods that are allotted to each of the planets. But, one of the things that’s interesting is that in this technique there was some sort of approach, and it’s ambiguous in the earliest authors, where based on the condition of the planet it will add or subtract a number of years based on certain criteria. So this is almost like, ideal scenario is a planet’s well placed in the chart. As the Co-Master, it can give its full years, and so the person lives a relatively long life, especially by ancient standards. Versus, if it’s afflicted or it’s not well placed, if it’s poorly placed by different conditions, it subtracts a certain number of years.

And one of the things that sucks is that the authors don’t clearly– especially the Hellenistic authors do not clearly outline the specific algebra for adding and subtracting a number of years based on different placements. Some of the later medieval and renaissance authors tried to come up with their own approaches to specific numbers and stuff. But, in researching this in the ancient sources, there was the implication that you could get this full number of years if the planet’s well placed, but you might have to subtract years based on poor conditioning and not ideal placement. And it doesn’t seem to have been outlined explicitly in any of the surviving texts, but maybe in some of the not surviving ones it was, I don’t know.

LS: Mmhmm, right.

CB: That’s unfortunate. There’s this nice little quote from Firmicus Maternus when he’s talking about the Master of the Nativity, where he says, “…The Master of the Nativity (which the Greeks call the oikodespotes): it possesses the sum of the whole nativity, and from it the individual stars are allotted the freedom of [their] decree. Which if it were arranged well, in the signs in which it rejoices or in which it is exalted, or in their own domiciles, and the birth were of its sect, nor [were it] struck by the harmful rays of the malefics, nor destitute of the protection of the benefics, it decrees all goods according to the quality of its nature, and [it decrees] the entire number of [its] years. But if it were impeded by the malefics, or deserted by the benefics, all of its efficacy, having been weakened, grows faint.”

There’s different translations, like Holden translated that passage, and Bram translated that passage from Firmicus in the ‘70s. But Ben [Dykes] is working on a new translation because it turns out, if you translate Firmicus literally, Firmicus is actually very interesting and his language is very flowery. It already comes off as kind of bombastic in some of the current translations, but there’s some interesting subtleties and nuances in his language. So, Ben Dykes translated that passage for me from a translation, that I hope he does the whole thing at some point.

Anyways, in this you can already see the doctrine already of the idea of the Master and the Co-Master indicating a certain number of years, and if they’re really well placed, will indicate the full number of years of that planet, but if they have things, like afflictions from malefics, or even things potentially like cadency, or other debilitating factors, they can subtract from the life force or the vitality indicated by that planet and shorten the length of life.

That’s where this whole technique veers into the length of life technique, and why there’s some overlap between those two, which gets ambiguous because we’re clearly talking about some similar things, we’re talking about overlap here, but it’s not clear if it was entirely meant to be overlap in the beginning or what, since other authors, like Rhetorius, they’re talking about the character analysis with this planet, and talking about it to find the Guardian spirit, and things like that. But then you get other authors, where it gets down to this very technical thing of literally trying to predict how long the person will live, which is a much more practical and much more technique-oriented type thing.

LS: And much more oriented towards the body, and not so much the character at all.

CB: Yes, almost like not the soul, it’s almost like a body-soul distinction.

I did have one really quick example chart, because I don’t want to get deep into this whole length of life thing, because that’s a whole can of worms I’m not prepared to deal with. However, I will refer us back to one interesting example that I used earlier. Again, just to demonstrate how this would work theoretically, here’s the chart of T.S. Eliot again, who… remember from earlier: his predominator was the Moon at 14° of Gemini. If you look at the Egyptian bounds for Gemini, 14° of Gemini is the bounds of Venus.

So the Moon is in the bounds of Venus, it’s in the degrees of Venus in the middle of Gemini – so Venus becomes the Co-Master of the Nativity. And we remember, of course, that Venus is actually conjunct Mercury at 24° of Libra, and conjunct the degree of the Ascendant which is at 25° Libra, and Mercury’s at 26° Libra. So, the result is that Mercury is the Master of the Nativity and Venus is the Co-Master; these two planets that are interestingly conjunct on the Ascendant his chart, and of course, as I said earlier, he is a famous American poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Interestingly, and weirdly I’ll just throw this out here, he died at the age of 76, and 76 is, of course, as I showed in the previous slide, 76 is the greater period of Mercury. So, he ended up living a full life and ended up living to almost exactly the period of Mercury. If he’d live to 82, that would have been slightly more interesting, because that would be the period of Venus, which is the bound lord, but weirdly, for whatever reason, he did live to the number of years associated with the Master of the Nativity in his chart. So, little interesting, little inconsistency, but nonetheless I’ll just throw that out there [chuckling].

LS: Sure [chuckling].

CB: Put that out there and then we’ll move on.

LS: Do your own research on that.

CB: Yes, I will leave that up to other people, more enterprising individuals, to research and figure out what there is to that. There’s plenty of debates and discussions. And I remember being at Kepler, 10 or 15 years ago, when we did do a class talking about some of the traditional approaches to the length of life, and our teacher was Lee Lehman for traditional Western astrology but it was also co-taught by Dennis Harness, who was talking more about the Vedic approach to longevity and length of life, which was very different. And I did this whole research project, where I went through, and I read as many translations and all of the treatments on the length of life treatment in the Western tradition I could find, that summarized them.

But one of the interesting debates, that at the time I didn’t really appreciate, but I appreciate a little bit more now, was both Lee and Dennis were speculating and saying, one of the problems of the length of life technique in modern times may be, that it may have more to do with hits to the person’s vitality at different point or periods, in which they could suffer a period of low vitality, either through illness, or through injury, that in ancient times could have been fatal, without the benefits of modern medicine.

But potentially in modern times, where somebody can be saved from something that otherwise would have been life threatening or debilitating a few centuries ago, now could just be a period of low vitality and difficulties, but not necessarily fatal. And the question is, there’s a real, not just technical, but philosophical debate there of is the length of life technique…

Because at the time this just annoyed me. I thought that was annoying, almost like a cop-out. And I was thinking originally, “No, if it’s supposed to be the length of life technique, it’s supposed to tell you how long you live, regardless of whether you are near a doctor at the time, because, as I was thinking, it was supposed to be more universally encompassing a person’s fate. But I’m a little bit more sympathetic to the other view now, that maybe what it’s showing potential periods of low vitality, which may or may not necessarily be fatal.

LS: Yes, I’ve seen Lee write that a few different places before.

Although it’s interesting, I think the immediate thought that comes up, as well, “People live longer now,” but actually people don’t live a ton longer. It’s more like infant mortality has gone down. More babies and young children died before, but if they survived… I was actually surprised to learn this at some point, that the length of life wasn’t crazy low, compared to now.

CB: Yes, that if you survived infancy or childhood, people could live to much older age than you’d expect.

LS: Yeah, exactly.

CB: Sure, and I don’t know. Vitality…It’s already been a long night. [Both laughing] We don’t have to go there. That’s a whole other separate podcast, which I will do at some point, but I’ve been avoiding the issue, because it’s a tricky one. But doing this is a nice precursor, just like with the house division one, and with the astrology and christianity one. This is a nice precursor, that at some point because that’s one of the things I’ve always tried to do with the podcast, is do certain episodes first that would lead into others, and put off doing certain ones until we’ve done the necessary build up.

LS: We’ve come up with four or five more out of this one.

CB: Three more with this one, I think. Right?

LS: I’m not sure.

CB: We have gone pretty far through this.

LS: Something like that.

CB: Maybe you’re right, maybe it is four or five more. [crosstalk]

Alright, so we have gone pretty far through this. I do want to throw in a little bit more, because that’s basically the first tradition to approaching the Master of the Nativity, but remember: Porphyry said that that’s the first tradition and there’s a whole second variant tradition for determining the Master of the Nativity.

And Porphyry reports it as follows: in the second tradition, which he doesn’t name– The first one, we assume, probably comes from Nechepso and Petosiris; the second one, it’s a little bit less clear. He says in the second tradition the Master is the bound lord of the degree of the Ascendant, and the Co-Master of the Nativity is the domicile lord of the rising sign. So, this approach is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, it’s still using the domicile master and the bound lord as these two central or pivotal rulers of the sign, that we’re almost using as the predominator, in some sense. Except here it’s not focusing on Sun and Moon and only defaulting to the Ascendant in case those two are poorly placed, but instead saying the Ascendant itself is always crucial and is always, essentially, the predominator in some sense for determining the Master and the Co-Master.

What’s also weird is, it’s inverting the relationship of which one is more important between the domicile lord and the bound lord. Because here it’s saying that the bound lord is actually the Master of the Nativity, the bound lord of the degree of the Ascendant, while the domicile lord of the entire rising sign is just a Co-Master. Which is interesting again in terms of whatever the motivation, or the logic, was of the author of this approach.

LS: Right.

CB: So, this approach is obviously more oriented towards the Ascendant. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that one of the most common themes that must have, I think I would speculate, go back to the original first text, that introduced the notion of the twelve houses and introduced the basic set of significations for those houses, which I think was a text written under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, that was published sometime in the first century, probably around the time of Nechepso and Petosiris. And Firmicus, kind of, treats Nechepso and Petosiris as coming after Hermes, and almost being as a contemporary of Hermes in some sense. So, in that text, based on a brief paraphrase of that text by Thrasyllus, who lived in the early first century, the Hermes text seems to have referred to the first house as “the helm”. Instead of referring to it as the “first house”, they called it “the helm”, like the helm of a ship, or the steering wheel of a ship, where you steer it from, right?

LS: Yeah.

CB: So, again, this seems to be invoking the nautical metaphor, and this is one of the things that actually makes me think, and provides some evidence, that Porphyry making that analogy earlier, about the steersman of the ship and the owner of the ship was not just necessarily a separate analogy, but perhaps was part of a broader interpretive principle, because pretty much all of the Hellenistic astrologers repeat this name for the first house, calling it “the helm”, which means that they referred to the first house almost like the steering wheel of the ship. Which almost then implies what are the other parts of the ship? What roles are the planets playing? And does that mean the planets in some instances are playing the role of different officers on the ship?

LS: Right.

CB: Their motivation here, if they were using that as an extended metaphor, which may be the case, and focusing on the Ascendant in this approach, may have been attempting to identify the steersman of the ship, or the captain of the ship, and the co-pilot of the ship, would be my speculation for what they would be trying to do in this approach, and why it would be slightly different than the other approach to almost motivate a variant tradition. If that’s the case, then the question is what questions were they trying to answer, or what was motivating them conceptually for doing this? And I would say part of their motivation would have been then questions like where is the native’s life headed? What topics will the native’s life be focused on?
And thinking that, by identifying the Master and the Co-Master and associating with the Ascendant and its rulers, that they could identify somehow what direction the natives’ life was headed in and what topics it would be focused on.

Let’s do one example chart just to show you what that would look like if we applied this doctrine into one famous nativity. This is the birth chart of Franklin Roosevelt. He had around 23° of Virgo rising, in the bounds of Mars. So, Mars, according to this approach, would be the Master of the Nativity. And Mars is located at 27° of Gemini in the 10th house in his chart, in a night chart.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, of course, was president during World War II. During the biggest war in the history of the world so far, he was the head of the country. And there’s something interesting about the fact that in this approach the Master of his Nativity, or the planet directing things, would be that Mars in the 10th house for him. The Co-Master of the Nativity in this approach, with Virgo rising, would be Mercury and Mercury is located at 27° of Aquarius in the sixth house, and the sixth house was traditionally associated with illness. Roosevelt famously contracted polio in his late 30s and became, as a result of that, permanently paralyzed from the waist down, so that he became the first president in the United States history with a severe or significant disability. More than that, he ended up, as a result of his experience with polio, being committed to finding a way to rehabilitate himself, as well as others with polio, and the foundation that he created eventually went on to fund the development of the polio vaccine.

So, we see two arguably major not just personal factors in his life that came to dominate his life, especially later in his life, but also larger themes, that his life ended up influencing in the world at large, I would argue, might be part of what we’re seeing there – where the Master and the Co-Master of the Nativity ended up indicating themes, that his life came to represent, and came to influence in the world in general, through one of them being that Mars in the 10th house and its involvement in the major war, and the other being that personal struggle with illness, but also the effect that his illness ended up having on potentially millions of other people.

That’s one of the examples that I wanted to use. You know, I could also throw in Linda Goodman but I think we’re probably good at this point. [Scanned through presentation slides with information.] Oh yeah, I also have the Judy Blume example.

Alright, I’ll just throw these slides up for the video version.

There’s a Linda Goodman chart where, again, it just focuses on Mars being the Master of the Nativity and in the third house, and her being the highest best-selling astrology book ever potentially. Arguably. Maybe.

LS: Maybe.

CB: Documented astrology book sales.

LS: Yeah.

CB: And then Judy Blume. Let’s do her’s really quickly. I mean, with her’s, her Ascendant’s at 18° of Libra. The Ascendant is in the bounds of Jupiter, so Jupiter is the Master. Jupiter is located in the fifth whole-sign house in Aquarius. Her Ascendant is in Libra, so the domicile lord is Venus, so Venus becomes the Co-Master. It’s also in Aquarius in the fifth house.

And she, of course, is a famous author. This is actually one of your favorite example charts, right?

LS: Yeah, I think, I initially lent it to you. It has gone on to an illustrious existence in many of your lectures.

CB: Right. So tell us about Judy Blume.

LS: Oh, just that she’s a really famous children’s book author in particular, very prolific. She’s known for both of those things: writing a ton of books, and them being children’s books.

CB: And she has won tons of awards and actually began writing in her biography while her kids were in preschool.

It’s tricky, because on the one hand, you could argue this isn’t a great example, because she has a stellium in Aquarius in the fifth whole-sign house anyway, with Mercury, Jupiter, the Sun, and Venus there. So, arguably you could say, “You don’t need the Master of the Nativity and the Co-Master to know that the fifth house is going to be a major dominant theme in her life.” But arguably, the Master and the Co-Master of the Nativity, the rulers in that chart, could have been Mars and Saturn, which are her seventh house, or her Moon, which is in her 11th house. But the fact that they ended up being in the fifth house – both of them – is kind of interesting, in the dominant role that that’s gone on to play not just in her life, but also her influencing the lives of millions of other people through her children’s books.

LS: Yes, and I think that about this example and the one before, the Roosevelt one, because Mars was really angular, it was angular to both the Midheaven and the Ascendant, but it is interesting that it ended up being Mars, instead of something else.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

CB: Yeah, it’s interesting, not conclusive, but partially just for the sake of not using only hypothetical examples, but to throw out some little tidbits and interesting possibilities for the research.

LS: Definitely.

CB: Alright, so to wrap up this little bit on the Master of the Nativity and the role of the Master of the Nativity…The Master of the Nativity seems to focus on one, character and character analysis. And ancient astrology, as a quote from Rhetorius explained, and as some of the background stuff, like the quote from Iamblichus, has explained also, in terms of giving some broader metaphysical explanation of why that might be. Two, the Master of the Nativity seemed to focus on matters pertaining to health and physical vitality. And then three, finally, something about the native’s focus and overall life direction. So, I don’t know, those are pretty broad categories, but they’re also specific in some ways as well.

Normally this would end here, and we are pretty much over, because that’s pretty much the end of the whole thing on the Master of the Nativity. But to throw in a little bonus material, if I may?

LS: Sure [laughing], I mean, you know.

CB: We’re at 3 hours and 1 minute, so I’ll make this part as brief as I possibly can.

LS: Sure.

CB: Porphyry, as I pointed out at the beginning of this talk, mentioned one other powerful ruler of the Nativity, and this one is what he calls the lord of the Nativity, the kurios in Greek, which means “lord”. It’s a term that’s actually used really frequently in the Bible in the New Testament, if you read, and it’s constantly talking about “lord this” and “lord that” – it’s using the word kurios.

Porphyry again outlines two variant approaches to determining the Lord of the Nativity. And there’s a bit of a question. Are these presumably still the two same original sources that we were talking about earlier, or are the two different sources? I think we can assume that they’re the still the two initial sources, which are probably Nechepso and Petosiris, and then one other unnamed source, which I speculate is probably the Hermes text or one of the texts attributed to Hermes, but I don’t really know for sure. He outlines two approaches. One of them emphasizes the 10th house and the most elevated planet in the chart while the second approach focuses on powerful or notable planets in the chart. The first approach is actually pretty simple, and the second approach is actually ridiculously complicated. So, I’ll just give you a bit of a summary of it.

In my interpretation of this, if the nautical metaphor is meant to be applied to this in Porphyry, then, I think, the analogy is that the Lord is like the owner of the ship, the guy that overall gets to call the shots about… the Master is like the steersman, that’s steering it towards certain topics, and sometimes might mess up and run into rock, or something, which totally sinks the boat – that’s the physical vitality part. But the Lord is the one who’s overall in charge and gets to call the shots about what you should be accomplishing in general and what your reputation is going to be as a result of it. So, the lord seems to be connected especially with the natives’ career and reputation whereas [with] the Master there’s a tendency, for them, to treat that more as having to do with matters pertaining to character and health.

When we get to talking about eminence factors, the lord seems to be majorly about an eminence factor. And one of the things that’s tricky about the lord, and that’s interesting and unique, compared to the Master, is that they say quite explicitly, and just how the rules are set up, especially with the second variant tradition, not every chart has a lord, in the same way that not every person is eminent.

LS: Sure.

CB: Yeah. The first approach that Porphyry reports to determining the Lord of the Nativity is pretty straightforward. He says the candidates for the Lord of the Nativity are the domicile lord of the Midheaven, if this planet is angular, a planet in the 10th house, or a planet in the 11th house. And if no planets meet this criteria, then there is no Lord of the Nativity. So, pretty simple and pretty straightforward.

Again, we’re focusing already in this variant on the Midheaven, the tenth house, and the eleventh house, and those are the highest part of the charts, so we’re talking about visibility, eminence, reputation. And saying that in some instances somebody might have this, might have a prominent planet in the chart, in which case it becomes Lord of the Nativity, but if they don’t then there is no lord and it may imply there is no eminence, you know?

LS: Yeah, I think the analogy breaks a little bit in terms of the owner, because then no one owns the ship.

CB: Then nobody owns the ship…

LS: Just that piece of it, that’s all.

CB: Right. Well, I should state, this is one of the areas where Schmidt and I disagreed, because in Schmidt’s reconstruction, in his translation of Antiochus in Definitions and Foundations, he believed that the Master of the Nativity is like the owner of the ship, and that the Lord of the Nativity is like the steersman. But I thought he got it reversed. And Porphyry is not clear– it’s like Porphyry doesn’t make this clear, because it’s not even clear if Porphyry is just making an analogy, or if he actually meant this as a specific technical doctrine of associating certain officers with certain rulers of the chart. We don’t know. But I interpreted it differently, and it’s because of the tendency, in the second variant of the Master of the Nativity, to focus on the Ascendant, and we know that the Ascendant is called the helm, therefore that’s one of the reasons why… And also because even in the first variant of the Master of the Nativity, even though they’re focusing on the luminaries, they do eventually default to the Ascendant. So, in both variants of the Master of the Nativity calculation, from those two authors, they seem to have a tendency to focus more on the Ascendant. And that’s the reason – and because the Ascendant is called the helm, which is one of the very few instances where we can definitely validate that there was some nautical paradigm, or some nautical metaphor – that’s the reason why I think, if Porphyry’s analogy is meant to be taken more literally, or seriously, then it’s the steersman of the ship that should be associated with the Master of the Nativity. So, there’s something I did mean to mention. Versus notice in this first variant for determining the Lord of the Nativity they’re entirely focused on the most elevated part of the chart and they’re focused on the tenth house, the Midheaven, and the eleventh, which tend to be associated with eminent people and superiors and things like that. And that’s why, I think, the owner of the ship, if you’re going to go in that direction, would be what Porphyry would connect that with, rather than the steersman.

LS: Yeah, I can see that.

CB: But it’s a debate open to interpretation. So, that’s the first approach to the Lord of the Nativity.

The second approach for determining the Lord of the Nativity according to Porphyry is that there’s different candidates and he lists off this whole string of candidates, and it gets actually really complicated. But here they are really quick. He says the candidates for being the Lord of the Nativity according to the second approach from some early anonymous source – again, who knows, maybe some hermetic texts, no idea. The first candidate is the domicile lord of the Ascendant. The second candidate is a planet in the rising sign and, I have in parentheses “especially?” because I’m wondering if that’s what’s implied here, if it is in the bounds of the Ascendant. So whatever the bounds that the Ascendant is located in, that becomes a candidate. Three, the Lord of the Moon, the domicile Lord of the Moon. Four, the fourth candidate is the domicile Lord of the Lot of Fortune. The fifth candidate is a planet that makes a heliacal rising, setting, or retrograde station within seven days of birth. If there are multiple, then the one that is not under the beams is preferred. A nice little parenthetical remark. And then sixth the bound lord of the prenatal lunation, which is the new or full moon that took place immediately prior to the native’s birth. So, those are the six-ish potential candidates for the Lord of the Nativity according to the second approach.

LS: Yeah, that’s the kitchen sink approach.

CB: Yeah, we’re clearly just talking about a lot of stuff, and clearly we’re getting into some other whole different territory here. But this is where it starts getting into more eminence factors, because some of those things that it’s talking about are unique astronomical things that would make a chart stand out in a way that other charts don’t. Especially criteria five, when it starts talking about planets making a heliacal rising, or setting, or retrograde station within seven days of birth. That’s more of an eminence factor, or something that would be unique, or something that would stand out in some way. Although some of the other ones are ones that everybody would have.

But here’s the deciding factor. You have those criteria, but then it goes on, and he says that the criteria for determining between them, and what very little he says about this is that the planet should not be under the beams, in order to be the Lord of the Nativity, and if it is out of those like six candidates then it’s disqualified. So if it’s too close, if it’s within 15° of the Sun, it’s disqualified. The one that has more dignity in its location via sign rulership. So, if a planet’s in its own domicile, it’s going to win out over a planet that’s not in its own domicile. It has the most power in terms of angularity. So a planet that is more angular is going to win out over a planet that is succedent or cadent. And finally the one that has the most power, between those six, in terms of its configuration with other planets in the chart. That’s how I interpret the final clause that Porphyry gives there. So, what it is then, it’s actually a list of, like, six-plus possible planets in the chart, and you determine if one of them is standing out according to those other criteria, and if it does, that becomes the Lord of Nativity.

So, we can see then, at this point, why Porphyry says, at this stage, that this is the most complex and difficult doctrine in the whole of astrology. In some cases it’s going to be easier to calculate, in other cases it’s going to be much harder to calculate. Some charts may all point to the same thing, and we saw overlap in some of the other examples, if I’d gone through– I guess, I didn’t linger on it, but the one example of the famous astrologer, who wrote the Sun Sign book, Linda Goodman, where there was some overlap with hers. Or with, for example, Judy Blume, where, according to one approach, she had the ruler and the co-ruler in the same sign. So, some of them will have overlap, or focus, but others may not have certain ruling planets at all. It’s possible not to have a Lord of the Nativity, evidently, if none of those six candidates meet the qualifying criteria. Whereas some people do have the Lord of the Nativity, and I think the Lord of Nativity becomes almost like an eminence factor as a result of that – and that’s why some people can have it and some people don’t.

So, coming full circle here, back to our friend Vettius Valens. Remember, I opened this whole talk with Valens quoting this passage from Petosiris. It is very priceless, the fact that Valens preserved that quote from Petosiris about the Master of the Nativity and how important it is.

One of the things that’s funny is if you keep reading through that passage in book II of Valens, he actually goes on to criticize Petosiris for that statement and for emphasizing the idea of one ruler too much. And Valens says instead, that there’s multiple. So Valens says, “It’s necessary to consider one house for occupation and rank, another for life, and another for injury, disease, and death. Not everything will depend on one Master. We act more rationally when we make our forecasts after considering many influences”

So, basically Valens is undercutting the whole idea, that I introduced at the very beginning of this talk with the very first quote from Petosiris, where Petosiris is talking about this one Master of the Nativity that just grants everything, and that with it you have all these things and without it you have nothing. I mean, it’s a little complicated because we already see in Porphyry, he’s talking about the multiple rulers of the chart. So, there’s a little bit of ambiguity here, and a little bit of a question of did any of these astrologers ever really think there was really only one planet that dominated everything, or did the doctrine itself always come with a Co-Master of the Nativity? Or the fact that the predominator is so important in finding the Master of the Nativity, and how much is the predominator one of the rulers, really? Or how much the doctrine of the Lord of the Nativity is intertwined with the concept of the Master of the Nativity? And if it is, can that be removed from the whole doctrine?

LS: Right.

CB: So it gets complicated from the start. And Valens here, though, is talking about how it’s important, that all rulers are important, it’s important to take into account things like the rulers of the different houses, that there’s going to be a house that signifies career, there’s going to be a house that signifies vitality, and so on and so forth, and that it’s not all going to come down to one thing. But instead of spending all your time just driving yourself crazy trying to calculate one Master, to look at the chart, I don’t know if the term’s holistically, but look at the many different pieces and components that are going on and make your forecasts or your predictions according to that by calculating many different things, instead of trying to reduce everything to one.

LS: Right, multifaceted.

CB: Right.

LS: Yeah.

CB: So that’s funny and interesting, and I thought that was a great way to round out the talk. I wanted to introduce the entire doctrine, so you can understand both the idea that maybe there is dominant planet, then maybe the idea that there’s dominant planets, and then the broader question that we can now discuss as a community which is does it make sense to try to focus on one planet, versus is there inherently going to be multiple? And there’s plenty that obviously can be discussed surrounding them.

LS: That was my favorite part of the talk to talk about, even it it’s at the end here, and we’ve been going a while.

CB: Three hours and 17 minutes.

LS: Yeah [laughing].

CB: We did almost make it the intended three hours. We’re making progress. This wasn’t a four hour zodiacal releasing episode.

LS: Yeah, for sure. I’m unbalanced inside in terms of there’s lots of things going on in the chart, and I wonder, if it’s almost an idealistic pursuit to try to find one planet that really matters above all? But also, that said, I could see the usefulness of some of these things in terms of, at the very least, identifying planets that matter more than others, or have a secret emphasis, that you’re not aware of.

CB: Yes, definitely, because that’s definitely one of the things that, I think, modern astrology as I learned it in the early 21st century didn’t do well is you would learn about all the different meanings of the planets and all the different places, but there was a real issue with prioritization and figuring out what’s more important than other. It’s almost like the desire to create an astrology of liberation, and of not talking about placements as being good or bad, and rejecting distinctions like benefic and malefic, and instead just talking about what is good about any placement in some ways removed any hierarchical thinking, which I can understand on some level, why you’d want to do that, and what’s valuable and important, especially from a counseling perspective. But on the other hand you also lose some of the technical edge of being able to know what to focus on and what’s more important, relative to the things that are less important in some sense.

LS: Yeah, I totally agree.

CB: Especially in certain contexts, there might be some things that are more important to look at in some context, when you want to see career, versus maybe there’s something that’s more important when we want to talk about health or vitality.

LS: For sure.

CB: Alright, so let’s see. My conclusion to this talk, as I ended it a month ago, or a year ago, or two years ago, whenever I put this together first, was that there’s many different rulers of the Nativity. I think we can see, at the very least, there’s a Master and a Co-Master, and maybe a Master and a predominator, or maybe a Master, Predominator, a Co-Master, and a Lord. There’s some planets going around that are important, but one of the purposes here seems to be to identify planets that are more important. Oh, [laughing] you took my concluding statement from my very last slide.

LS: Oh, I’m sorry [laughing]. Well, we agree.

CB: Okay.

LS: That’s the conclusion.

CB: I guess that’s alright then. The Master of the Nativity in this whole doctrine surrounding different rulers of the nativity… That actually would have been a better title for this talk, but I think I’m still going to refer to it as the Master of the Nativity, as the main title, which is a little bit misleading, so I do a little bit of a fake out there, but that’s alright. It can also help to identify the role of different rulers, potentially, as you were saying and stealing my talk [both laughing], that there may be some that are more relevant for character, vitality – like arguably, I think, the Master they seem to be pushing it in that direction whereas there may be others that are more important for things like occupation and eminence, which seems to be a little bit more what the Lord of the Nativity was designed to indicate. This may explain one of the things that I think is interesting about this doctrine, and one of the things I’m excited about. I think it may explain why some people are more overtly characterized by certain placements than others, and why some people, as I said earlier, maybe really respond to their Sun sign, or may really respond to their Moon sign, or may respond to their Rising sign. And it may give us an access point for understanding better why that would be in some instances, and why it would not necessarily be consistent across the board.

LS: Right.

CB: The last thing about– the last take-home lesson for me is this is another one of those instances, where, I think, even just that insight alone, if we were able to just take that from this, in terms of the idea of a predominator, and an idea that some people will be dominated by their Sun, Moon, or rising sign, and that there may be a way to figure out which it’s going to be, and that that may have some broader implications for us and our understanding of astrology, and how people relate to natal astrology, is that this shows that there are valuable insights to be gained from ancient astrology, from going back and studying and reading some of these old ancient dusty texts, and it’s not just purely academic. While there is an interesting academic and historical and social or even religious and philosophical side to it, there’s nothing wrong with studying that, there may be other insights that are more practical and more useful for contemporary astrologers.

And so, that’s why I like to end a lot of my talks with the cheesy saying that, by looking back into the past we can create a better astrology for the future. Not by going back into the past, and everybody dressing up in togas, and pretending that we’re ancient Greeks and it’s 2000 years ago. But instead by going back, looking and seeing if there’s useful and interesting information from the past, and bringing it forward into the future because one of the points is, that this doctrine is literally from texts that we didn’t have access to until very recently, until some modern contemporary astrologers, like James Holden and Robert Schmidt, went back and translated some of these texts into modern languages, so that contemporary astrologers could start reading them again and could be reconnected with our tradition and bring some of those techniques forward. So, I think it does that, and that’s part of the work that we’re doing now. And that was part of the purpose of this talk today. So, thanks a lot for staying up late to do this with me tonight. I appreciate it.

LS: You’re welcome.

CB: Thanks to everyone for listening to one of me and Leisa’s long, new, additional marathon sessions. We appreciate it.

Oh yes, I have the other usual slide thing, where I got to make a pitch. So, if you’re interested in Hellenistic astrology, check out my book Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, available in fine bookstores everywhere, and by that I mean, basically, just go to Amazon and buy the book, just do a search and you’ll find it. It’s also available in Barnes & Noble, and a few other bookstores, if you ask them super, super nicely for it.

I also have a course on Hellenistic astrology, where I have over a hundred hours of lectures, where I go deeper into material, like the ruler of the Ascendant, whole sign houses, sect, triplicity rulers, timing techniques, and tons of other stuff, and I use hundreds and hundreds of example charts to demonstrate how the techniques actually work in practice. The course comes with a copy of my book, and you can actually get a discount on my course, if you already own the book. So, just email me if you already have it, I’ll give you the discount code.

For more information about that, please see the course description page at TheAstrologySchool.com.

Alright, and that my friends, leaves us at the end of this lecture. Those are my websites, www.HellenisticAstrology.com, www.ChrisBrennanAstrologer.com, and www.TheAstrologyPodcast.com. This has been episode 205 of the podcast. We are clocking in at three and a half hours. It is now two o’clock in the morning, so I think we were both going to go pass out, we did forget to have dinner tonight.

LS: Yeah.

CB: How are you doing?

LS: I’m ready for dinner.

CB: Alright, so we’re going to go get dinner somewhere. Alright, cool. Well thanks for joining me.

LS: You’re welcome. Thanks for listening, everyone.

CB: Yeah, thanks a lot for listening. Thanks to Steven for editing this. Thanks to Paula Belluomini for some of the diagrams. Gemini Brett, and anyone else, that I’m forgetting. Thanks especially to the patrons, who support this work and make this possible, that I can just like record this huge three-and-a-half hour workshop, and just put it out there for free.

It’s actually not completely for free, because basically we have a bunch of awesome patrons and supporters, who are donating $1 or $2 or $5 or $10 every time I put at an episode, and as a result of that we’ve been able to build this beautiful studio, we are able to keep recording interviews with great people, great astrologers every month, sometimes just putting out research like this, that I’ve sat on for years, I’m now able to release to the public, because this work is being supported by a group of patrons, who are paying to get more episodes and paying to have me keep upping the quality level and trying to put out more content each month. So if you support this work, if you listen to the podcast, or watch my YouTube channel, and you want to support that and show your appreciation and buy me and Leisa dinner or coffee each time we do it, then consider becoming a patron, you can find out more information at the www.astrologypodcast.com/subscribe, where there’s a link to our Patreon page, where you can sign up and get early access to new episodes, access to me and Leisa’s election astrology episode, that we do each month, we also do a casual astrology podcast, which is just for patrons, and a ton of other bonus content.

Alright, that’s it for this pitch, let’s go get some food.

LS: Alright, sounds good

CB: Alright, thanks everyone for listening, or watching, and we will see you next time.

LS: See you next time

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