The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 548, titled:

The Hermetic Origins of Hellenistic Astrology

With Chris Brennan

Episode originally released on September 4, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/09/04/the-hermetic-origins-of-hellenistic-astrology/

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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 Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released September 19th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hellenistic astrology emerged in Egypt in the second century BCE, and it partially represents a synthesis of the earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian astrological traditions that were merged together into one new tradition. So partially a gradual synthesis, however, it also partially represents this brilliant invention, this deliberate invention that took place at the same time as well where a group of astrologers deliberately took some different pieces from the earlier astrological traditions and combined them together and then also created a number of additional technical constructs to practice and to frame the way that they used and conceptualized astrology. And this was especially patterned after a series of diagrams, such as the Thema mundi, the planetary order of the seven-zoned sphere, the exaltations, and then finally the planetary joys scheme, which is a system for assigning significations to the 12 houses. 

So over the course of the past decade ever since I published my book on Hellenistic astrology in 2017 where I had several chapters and really throughout the book a lot of it is trying to reconstruct the origins of Hellenistic astrology and recognize both the element of gradual development but also the element of sudden invention. And there’s been a lot of new discoveries over the course of the past nine years, almost 10 years since I published my book, both archeological discoveries where people are actually finding new materials and digging up new materials on astrology that we didn’t know about until recently that are teaching us new things, and then also I’ve continued to expand my own research as I’ve been trying to reconstruct the origins of Hellenistic astrology and especially the mysterious or shadowy collection of source texts that I talked about in my book that seem to lie at the very roots of that new tradition or system going back to the second century BCE, especially surrounding a collection of four texts by or attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, a king named Nechepso – a supposed Egyptian king, and a priest named Petosiris. 

So there’s been so many new discoveries that I wanted to do an episode today to talk about that and to talk about where things are at at the present time, and to sort of present my current synthesis in terms of my understanding of the origins of Hellenistic astrology and especially its connection with ancient Hermeticism, both in terms of the ancient philosophical Hermetica as well as the technical Hermetica, because that’s one of the most exciting things that’s been happening in terms of some of the archeological research is that Egyptologists have been finding birth charts and texts and other things especially in the ancient Egyptian language of Demotic that have been showing us that astrology was practiced in the Egyptian temples during the Hellenistic and Romans periods. And that sometimes they were using techniques that we didn’t know existed up until recently. So what I did is over the past few months this summer, I decided to sit down and pull everything together this summer that I’d learned in terms of the history, that I’d learned in terms of new archeological research, things that I pieced together from further studies on, like, ancient philosophy and religion over the past 10 years, and sort of put this all together in order to see what I come up with in addition to really sitting down with the Thema mundi and some of the related diagrams like the joys and the exaltations and now the order of the seven-zoned sphere, which I recently did an episode on, and see based on my current historical understanding if I can piece together better how this system was put together deliberately or created based on some of the new historical evidence that I’ve learned over the past decade. And the results over the past few months have been really spectacular, so that’s what I want to outline today. 

All right, so my purpose of this talk is I’m gonna try to cover a lot. Like, this is gonna be a lot. But it’s gonna be really good. And the first thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna talk about the earlier Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek astrological, scientific, and philosophical traditions that acted as a precursor for Hellenistic astrology. So that’s gonna be part one of this talk or the first third perhaps. Then in part two, I want to present a reconstruction of what some of the foundational technical constructs were in Hellenistic astrology, and especially how they fit together and were interconnected in different ways. Because that’s the piece that’s so important is that many of these diagrams, like the Thema mundi or the joys, were not introduced in isolation, but instead they fit together and they overlap in this really bizarre but really interesting and really exciting way to create a system or an interlocking technical construct. So one of the things I wanna do today is show you both some of the things that were previously known, some of the things that I’ve outlined in different papers, such as my paper on the joys in 2012 and in my book, but also there have been some new discoveries about how those diagrams interlock, even in just the past few years, which really help to I think break the code and help us to fully understand exactly what happened and how they created the system. So I’m very excited to present that later in this episode. 

And then finally, I want to show how most of these core technical concepts can be traced back to this very specific group of about four Hermetic texts that were written in the second century BCE in Egypt, specifically a text on the 12 houses called the Dodecatropos attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a text on the octotropos or the eight-fold house system – it’s not an eight-fold system, but it’s called the eight-fold way or the eight-fold system by Asclepius, which is a system of assigning additional significations to just the first eight houses. So it’s like an addendum to the Hermes text. Then there’s a third text attributed to the king Nechepso that outlined the doctrine of the seven-zoned sphere and is actually, as far as I can tell as I talked about in that recent episode, one of our first documented sources and may in fact be part of the first group of people who introduced the Chaldean order of the planets, which placed the Sun in the center of the planetary order basically. And one of the things I argued recently and that I’ll reiterate in this episode is because the Nechepso text is the first one that we know of that mentions that system explicitly – the first source that we have a clear, indisputable reference to that system in – that the astrologers then, this group of astrologers or group of texts may have actually been the first ones to introduce or at least to have popularized that system from the second century BCE forward. 

And then finally the last text is the text attributed to Petosiris, which is sometimes grouped together with the Nechepso text and sometimes separate, but we know at least one part of that text on the length of life technique did seem to be a separate treatment that was just attributed to Petosiris. 

So ultimately, what I want to do to bring everything around is I want to situate the birth of Hellenistic astrology within the tradition of philosophical and technical Hermetica in the second century BCE, which is really early. And in particular, I want to emphasis that it’s important to recognize that this collection of Hermetic astrological texts are actually the earliest and potentially the most foundational texts of the entire Hermetic philosophical and technical corpus of texts in general, because usually the philosophical Hermetic texts are dated to the first and second and third century CE. However, already before 36 CE, we have the astrologer Thrasyllus being the first Greek source that we know of, I think, to refer to a text by Hermes Trismegistus using that name – the full name of Hermes Thrice Great. And that text that he’s referring to is the text on the 12 houses that goes back to the second century BCE. And so what I want to demonstrate then that the very earliest traces of the Hermetica and the Hermetic astrological tradition not just in terms of the technical Hermetica, but also in terms of the philosophical Hermetica and philosophical concepts that become so prominent in later Hermetic philosophy, some of those are already there in this collection of astrological texts in the second century BCE. So what that does is it will push back our understanding of when the Hermetic texts originated squarely back to the second century BCE, which has very important implications for the study of ancient philosophy, ancient religion, ancient mysticism, and of course the study of the history of astrology. 

So yeah. The end result should be to clarify the origins of what became one of the most influential traditions of astrology around the world today, which is still practiced all over the place by many, many people. And this is gonna be a really long research essay type episode because, you know, instead of just writing a paper or something like this or putting it in a book, yeah, I do these as video essays in order to share my latest research and thinking and thoughts and in order to be able to incorporate video and diagrams and visuals and all sorts of other things like that. But because it’s gonna be so long, I will add timestamps so that you can see the different chapters and sections and sort of like, how far through certain sections we are or if you need to revisit certain ones and so on and so forth just to make this a little bit more easy to navigate. 

But anyway, we got a lot to cover today, so let’s go ahead and jump into it and let’s get started.

All right, so before we get into the Hellenistic synthesis, we first have to establish the raw materials that the founders of Hellenistic astrology inherited. Because if Hellenistic astrology emerges in the second century BCE and especially really comes into view in the first century BCE, we know and we have to understand that there was almost, like, a 2,000-year long tradition of astrology in Mesopotamia as well as in Egypt that preceded that. And so there was lots of build up before Hellenistic astrology and lots of important technical and philosophical and other concepts that fed into it. 

So let’s first start by jumping into the Mesopotamian astrological tradition. And I’ve done an entire episode on that before, both a public episode that was a couple hours long with Willis Monroe, but then also I did a private episode that was a little longer with additional details. But I want to reiterate some of the most important points here today. 

All right, so astrology as divination. Astrology started out in Mesopotamia as a form of divination. Around 2000 BCE, we start seeing recordings of astrological omens that are recorded on clay tablets in cuneiform or in the language known as cuneiform. And some of the earliest omens that were recorded were probably eclipse omens, I think, according to Francesca Rochberg. So eclipses especially ancient astrologers started noticing, I believe, correlations between celestial movements and earthly events, especially for example the death of a king or the downfall of a king coinciding with an eclipse, which is still something we see commonly happen today such as earlier this year during an eclipse season here in 2026, or even in a previous episode on eclipses in history with my friend Nick Dagan Best, we found that there were three kings in the UK who all passed away around the time of eclipses in the 20th century. So I believe this is one of the first things, because eclipses are so powerful that really made ancient people especially in Mesopotamia, like, you know, sit up and start paying attention when they kept noticing important things happening around the time of eclipses. And then they started writing those things down. 

So eventually, after centuries, they started accumulating a textual tradition. And one of the most important ones was called the Enuma Anu Enlil where by around 1500 BCE, the celestial omens started being compiled into this large compilation of recorded basically an omen and then what the expected event would be. So some of these omens were often viewed through a legalistic paradigm of divine judgments or decrees of fate using the Mesopotamian concept of fate that was called simtu. So and fate was very important, because there was a conceptualization of it in Mesopotamia. There was also a conceptualization of fate in Egypt. And then eventually, that became very important during the Hellenistic period with the rise of Hellenistic astrology, which as I argued in my book was originally a system or in fact it became the system for studying an individual’s fate and predicting events about their future based on the alignment of the planets especially at the moment of birth. 

All right, so one of the things that’s really important in Mesopotamia that you need to understand about the astrologers is that they were this elite class of literate priests who could read and write and did scholarship. But they also were both astronomers as well as astrologers, because the two subjects were intertwined and were not distinguished from one another so that they would go out each night and look at the sky and observe where the planets and the stars were, but then they would also pay attention to correlations that were happening on earth at that time. And sky and earth were thought to be interconnected in that way. There’s actually a famous cuneiform tablet that says that very explicitly, that sky and earth are interconnected and not separate. 

So they were an elite class of priests, and they held specific titles such as the Scribe of the Enuma Anu Enlil, which remember is that big astrological compilation of astrological omens that became, like, their astrological bible in some way. And part of their goal was to interpret the will of the gods as part of their priestly duties, because the planets themselves and celestial phenomenon were viewed as heavenly manifestations of the gods or at least as some sort of heavenly writing that was conveying messages to mankind about the present and the future, which could be interpreted if you understood astrology and astronomy, essentially. 

All right, so moving forward, but about 1100 BCE, we see this very popular creation myth emerge in the ancient world in ancient Mesopotamia known as the Enuma Elish. And this is basically like the Babylonian creation myth that describes the god Marduk defeating the goddess Tiamat, and then he tears Tiamat apart – this, like, chaos goddess of some sort – and when Marduk tears Tiamat apart, it divides the world into the sky and into the earth. And it’s basically, like, their mythological creation story for the creation of the sky and the earth and the cosmos. And in this story, there’s a passage where it also talks about how this established the so-called “heavenly stations” of the gods, which are also functionally probably the heavenly stations in some sense of the planets. So this is probably in this myth we start to see the earliest conceptual root of the notion of planets having some sort of designated place in the sky essentially, which I think would become very important later on because not long after this we also see the emergence of the doctrine of what later became known as the signs of exaltation, or the notion that there’s certain places on the ecliptic or certain constellations or certain signs of the zodiac that are associated with certain planets. 

So I did want to read a quote from this section of the Enuma Elish, and this is from Willis Monroe’s translation that we cited in the episode I did last year on Mesopotamian astrology. So you can find that there, and you can find the citation and everything. But here’s the quote. It says – this is from the Enuma Elish, from the creation epic from around 1100 BCE let’s say give or take. And it said, 

“He fashioned heavenly stations for the great gods, and he set up constellations, the patterns of the stars. He appointed the year, marked off divisions, and set up three stars each for the 12 months. After he had organized the year, he established the heavenly station of Neberu to fix the stars’ intervals. That none should transgress or be slothful, he fixed the heavenly stations of Enlil and Ea with it. Gates he opened on both sides, and put strong bolts at the left and right.” 

So I mention this just because I think it’s really important that we start to see mythological and especially creation stories that start to try to explain how the cosmos is set up in different ways and also to try to explain or justify I think some of the systems that were being developed by astrologers which were especially associations with certain planets, with certain parts of the sky, or with certain constellations or zodiacal signs or what have you. And this is the earliest version of that, but we’ll see that this was the beginning of a tradition that would come up again in the Hellenistic period where I think later doctrines such as the Thema mundi or the birth chart of the cosmos were also probably presented in some sort of similar mythological way in the way that some of the other Hermetic philosophical texts were presented. Like, especially the first book of the Corpus Hermeticum known as the Poimandres, which presents this, like, cosmological vision of how the cosmos was created that was revealed to Hermes Trismegistus. So keep that in mind, because we’ll sort of return to that theme of the use of mythology by different authors, even Plato, for example, in the 4th century had this mythological creation story called the Timaeus that he used to explain the way that the cosmos was set up and constructed and eventually even why the planets came to be associated with fate. 

All right. So related to this is the exaltations, also known as the secret places, where by around 1000 BCE – so not long after the Enuma Elish, you know, is around and shows up on the stage for sure – we see the earliest origins of the planetary exaltations that they had already been developed in Mesopotamia, especially appearing in an astronomical/astrological compendium from around that time that was titled The MUL.APIN. And in this tradition, these positions in Mesopotamian astrology came to be referred to as the secret places or the secret houses of the planets. And this became, like, a really increasingly popular and important concept from at least around 1000 BCE forward, all the way into the birth of Hellenistic astrology where the concept of secret places or secret houses of the planets was inherited and then reconceptualized in the Hellenistic tradition. But here what’s interesting is that already there’s this notion that certain planets are associated with certain signs of the zodiac. So already in this text, it’s talking about Saturn having its secret place in the sign of Libra, the Sun I believe it says in Aries, and so on and so forth, which are the same placements as what later became the exaltations in Hellenistic astrology. And in my book – like, nine years ago, I had some skepticism for different reasons about whether the exaltations really were in the Mesopotamian tradition, partially because so many of the sources for them were really late cuneiform texts, especially close to the Hellenistic era, and so I wasn’t sure if there were concepts passing back and forth between Greek and cuneiform sources. Additionally, even though the secret places are mentioned in some of the Babylonian horoscopes from 410 BCE forward, they don’t seem to match when they’re mentioned – the positions that are mentioned in the charts. And so there was some ambiguity about whether the concept really did match the exaltations of later Hellenistic astrology. But at this point, after doing more extensive research and finding more texts and seeing a more recent edition especially of the MUL.APIN, for example, that was published I think not that long ago, it’s really clear to me that the exaltations really were in the Mesopotamian tradition since at least around 1000 CE. So one of the things that’s interesting about that that we’ll get into later is it means the exaltations were one of the core concepts that the Hellenistic astrologers or the founders of Hellenistic astrology inherited in the second century BCE, and then they used that to build this really complicated system of astrology around the exaltations. And originally in my book, when I was considering the different scenarios for the exaltations and what could be implied by the evidence, I thought that would be really implausible for the Hellenistic astrologers to have inherited the exaltations and then built this entire complex system around them. But at this point in my understanding in 2026, I realize that that’s actually exactly what happened. And just in the past few years, for example, my friend Ben Dykes discovered a way in which the planetary joys scheme and the distribution of the planets in the planetary joys scheme actually perfectly replicates the distribution of the planets in their exaltations so that it turns out the joys were partially derived by projecting the exaltations onto the 12 houses. And that’s something I’ll talk about later, but it’s been a really wild series of discoveries over the course of the past decade, but especially over the past few years that I’ve really been getting into this. That new evidence has been coming out for the exaltations, and that the full implications of that have started to become really clear. 

So that was really part of my other motivation recently was sitting down with the Thema mundi and the joys and all these other Hellenistic diagrams, and once it had been established that the exaltations really did come first, then trying to look at everything fresh from that vantage point in order to understand how things then would have been constructed originally. And once I did that, some really interesting things started to come out which I’ll talk about later once I get through this history section. 

All right, so other points about the exaltations really quickly. One of the really surprising things about the exaltations that’s just become clear recently due to the recent translation of the MUL.APIN is that they actually had a quasi-tropical rationale which really surprised me for the exaltation signs originally. So it’s kind of tricky to go into, but basically recently two scholars that published an edition of the MUL.APIN, Hermann Hunger and John Steele, had pointed out that in the commentary and the footnotes of their translation that the MUL.APIN lists the exaltations in the exact same sections as what’s known as the “three paths of the stars,” which suggests that these three paths are intimately connected with the rationale for the exaltations. And what’s important about that, which I think I’ll get into more later once we talk about the actual signs of exaltation, is that functionally, that ends up connecting the exaltations with sort of seasonal considerations connected with the equinoxes and the solstices, which is functionally what the basis of the tropical zodiac is based on. 

So one of the things that we’ll find later on is that the exaltation signs actually had a tropical rationale, although the later development of the exaltation degrees, it turns out, it was recently discovered have a sidereal rationale that’s based on certain fixed stars. And I’ll talk about that later. 

All right, so moving on just to keep going, there was a huge empirical and astronomical and scientific component to the Mesopotamian tradition where they had the longest running scientific program in history called the Astronomical Diaries where they had this continuous record of astrologer/astronomer-priests going out every night and observing the sky and where the planets and stars were, and then writing that down and also writing down some events that happened, like in the news at the time, like if the king died. They were also writing down prices in the markets. They were writing down the height of the river basically at that time and other factors where they’re clearly documenting in parallel things that were happening in the sky and things that were happening on earth. But after more than 500 years of that, it allowed for the emergence of a really complex, mathematical astronomy so that they were able to develop things like the goal year periods, which I did an episode on recently, in order to predict where the planets would be far into the future or far into the past with surprising accuracy. 

So eventually by the 5th century BCE, they started producing ephemerides essentially, and they also standardized the zodiac to be 12 signs of 30 degrees each. Not long after this, by the end of the 5th century BCE, but 410 BCE, we start to see some of the first surviving Mesopotamian birth charts so that we know that the concept of natal astrology had been invented or developed by that point by at least 410 BCE. And then from that point forward, Mesopotamian birth charts become increasingly frequent. So the idea earlier in the tradition was that the planets and stars especially coincided with earthly events that applied to large groups of people like cities and nations, or sometimes in relation to the king as the earthly representative of humanity. But with this development, they started applying celestial movements to the lives of individuals based on the alignment of the planets at the moment of birth and based on the signs of the zodiac each of the planets were in at birth, and then using that to predict information about a person’s future. 

All right, so that’s from 410 BCE forward. One of the things that starts happening that’s starting to become clear late in the Mesopotamian astrological tradition is that there’s evidence that the later Mesopotamian astrologers may have started to develop the concept of the four – what we would call from the later astrological tradition functionally the four angular houses, or the four angular places, which are like, rising, culminating, setting, and anticulminating. And some of the textual evidence for this comes from really late Babylonian texts such as one called TCL 6 14, which contains a specific set of natal astrology delineations or interpretations based on whether a planet “comes forth,” which seems to mean rises, or whether the planet has set, which seems to mean sets over the eastern horizon around the time of birth. And it’s like, originally I quoted that passage in my book, but it wasn’t clear to me if it was referring to heliacal rising and setting. But now instead it seems to be complex delineations for, like, when one planet’s rising over the eastern horizon, which we associate today with the Ascendant, versus when one planet is setting over the western horizon which today we associate with the Descendant. So I believe that this represents something that I sort of had hints of and I referred to in the footnotes, I think, in my book, which is that there was some sort of crucial intermediate stage in the history of astrology where astrologers started utilizing just the four angular houses, let’s say, without having developed or prior to the development of a full-fledged system of 12 houses. So imagine a system where instead you just have some more vague or general notion of planets rising, culminating, setting, and anticulminating being important for different reasons and starting to develop a rudimentary form of what those four placements mean. This seems to have started happening by the late Hellenistic tradition and in my book, I pointed out that there’s some evidence for this late development I believe in Book Five of Dorotheus of Sidon where he has the earliest sort of complete treatment of electional or inceptional astrology, also known as katarchic astrology where in Dorotheus’s approach, it’s almost entirely focused just on the four angular houses. And so many of Dorotheus’s electional rules seem to have arisen from a tradition almost prior to the advent of Hellenistic astrology where they weren’t using 12 houses, but instead they were just using these four sectors of rising, culminating, setting, and anticulminating. 

So Dorotheus himself claimed to have drawn on both the Mesopotamian as well as the Egyptian astrological traditions, and we actually see in the Egyptian tradition, which I’ll talk about next, was also a focus on the four angular places, but with respect to the decans. So it’s possible that there was also something like that developing in the Egyptian tradition at the same time. So we’ll circle back to that later. 

Now, a major realization that I had as I was doing some of this research this summer is that the house division issue and debate that later developed in Hellenistic astrology really has its roots in the way that timekeeping was done by the Mesopotamian and the Egyptian astrologers and how it was done differently in those two traditions. And part of what this comes down to is that in the Mesopotamian tradition, the Mesopotamians told time partially based on stars that were directly overhead at the time which astronomically is referred to as the zenith. And they had this collection of stars that they knew when that star was overhead, they knew exactly what time it was roughly, basically. And this conceptualization of using the zenith to mean the 90 degree point that’s directly overhead wherever you’re standing on earth later gets incorporated into the equal house Midheaven as well as the whole sign house Midheaven, because it’s basically the same as the nonagesimal, which is the 90-degree point that’s exactly 90 degrees upwards from the Ascendant degree in a birth chart or in an astrological chart. So it’s like, the early Mesopotamian timekeeping, then, is functionally using to tell time the equal house Midheaven or the whole sign house Midheaven functionally. But interestingly, from my understanding and what I’ve been learning about the Egyptian decans is that the Egyptian priests by contrast would tend to use the meridian in order to tell time based on the decans crossing the meridian at certain points, especially during the night. So the meridian and this focus on using the meridian to identify certain decans, if I understand that correctly, would then be more similar to the Midheaven that’s used in quadrant houses, which is the meridian, which is also the dividing point between north and south basically or east and west. I’m getting a little tripped up right now. But basically the Egyptians would have been using the quadrant Midheaven to tell time, whereas the Mesopotamians would have been using the equal or whole sign Midheaven functionally to tell time. And yeah, the meridian is the north-south point that intersects with the ecliptic. 

So therefore, what happened in the Hellenistic tradition is you have these two traditions converge in Hellenistic astrology, and that’s why you end up with, as I documented in a long 50-page paper in my book, these three different forms of house division in Hellenistic astrology that all fundamentally just have a different way of treating the Midheaven, which is that you have whole sign houses, which uses the 10th sign from the rising sign as the Midheaven. You have equal houses, which uses the 90-degree point or the nonagesimal as the Midheaven. And then you have quadrant houses, which uses the meridian as the Midheaven essentially. 

So that was just a really interesting insight I had, and I wanted to mention it in passing to show you some of the concrete ways that the merging of these two different traditions from Mesopotamia and Egypt sometimes gave or created complementary things, but other times what we’re seeing is tensions in the later tradition arise as a result of these two different longer traditions kind of like, being merged together and bumping up against each other in different ways. 

All right. One of the really important things I’ve been focusing on in the past few years is learning about and realizing that Mesopotamian astrologers actually believed that their astrological tradition or system was a divine revelation from an ancient sage named Adapa rather than just, like, a human invention. And this is really important, because they attributed the origins of their astral science to – as well as their compilation of foundational omen series, which is the Enuma Anu Enlil, to this mythical or ancient sage called Adapa. And this was supposed to be the first of the antediluvian, like, seven sages, and Adapa is supposed to be the first one who’s credited with teaching humanity writing, mathematics, but also astronomy and astrology. And I think this is really important, because it means that in Mesopotamia for hundreds of years before the emergence of Hellenistic astrology, there was this precedent essentially for early astrological texts to be framed as ancient revealed wisdom. And for anybody that’s studied later Hermeticism or Hellenistic astrology, that should sound very familiar to you, because that’s exactly how when Hellenistic astrology was created in the second century BCE we see the emergence of this figure of Hermes Trismegistus, who was associated with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth and who was also said to be, like, a god of writing and said to be an ancient sage who the astrological system or who different texts on philosophy were revealed to or who subsequently revealed those things to humanity. So there’s some sort of direct parallelism here, and that’s become one of the most interesting things for me. You know, in my book, I had treatments of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian traditions that I sort of condensed into one chapter to talk about precursors and then to really focus on Hellenistic astrology, which is the focus of the book. But so much of my research in the past decade has been truly understanding the continuities between the traditions, and the ways in which their several earlier precursor concepts and traditions that earlier astrologers were doing especially in Mesopotamia that then got directly either incorporated into or imitated in this interesting way in the early Hellenistic astrological tradition. And I think this is one of them. 

All right. A last thing I’ll mention about the Mesopotamians is a really late Mesopotamian astrologer named Berosus, who lived somewhere around let’s say 300 or 280 BCE who’s said to have immigrated from Mesopotamia to the Greek island of Kos and to have set up a school for astrology there, and he also wrote a text in Greek on the history of Mesopotamia. There’s a fragment attributed to Berosus in the later Roman philosopher Seneca where he says that according to Berosus, the world is periodically destroyed by fire or flood when all of the planets line up in Cancer or Capricorn. And it’s a fire in Cancer due to the summer heat, and it’s a flood in Capricorn because Capricorn is associated with the winter solstice. 

So here’s the quote. Let’s actually read the quote from Seneca. So this is from Natural Questions. He says, 

“Berosus, who translated Belus, says that these catastrophes occur with the movement of the planets. Indeed, he is so certain that he assigns a date for the conflagration and the deluge. For earthly things will burn, he contends, when all of the planets which now maintain different orbits come together in the sign of Cancer, and are so arranged in the same path that a straight line can pass through the spheres of all of them. The deluge will occur when the same group of planets meets in the sign of Capricorn.” 

So, you know, this is important because on the one thing – I mean, scholars sometimes try to, like, question whether Berosus the historian was really the same as Berosus the astrologer, but it’s really obvious to me that he is, and that these are probably one and the same people, and that Berosus as a Mesopotamian priest and astrologer both wrote a work on history but also talked about astrology potentially within that context. What’s interesting is that at one point in one of the fragments of Berosus, he also talks about Adapa and talks about Adapa revealing I believe he says, like, mathematics, which may be and often became a code word for astronomy and astrology. 

So what’s important about this quote, though, and why I wanted to mention it here is that it creates a possible Mesopotamian precedent for the destruction of the world being centered around the Cancer-Capricorn axis, which is says explicitly. But one of the things about this is that it may also imply that there’s some sort of connection with these two signs with the creation of the world as well, which then may actually create a precursor in the Mesopotamian tradition potentially, or the late Mesopotamian tradition, for the doctrine of the Thema mundi, which is the birth chart of the cosmos or of the sensible world. And it’s said to have Cancer rising and Capricorn on the Descendant. So those same two signs become incredible focal points in Hellenistic astrology at the very foundation of that tradition. But we may start seeing, like, hints of things heading in that direction among some of the earlier Mesopotamian astrologers. 

All right, now let’s talk about the Egyptian astrological tradition. So the Indigenous astrology of Egypt was built around the 36 decans, which were 36 either fixed stars or fixed star clusters known as asterisms that were in use since around 2000 BCE. So that’s like, 1,800 years at least before the emergence of Hellenistic astrology we have the use of decans, which at the very least were being used to track time. To tell the time in order to time different temple rituals based on either the rising or the culminating of certain decans. And additionally, Egyptian culture was extremely tied in with the annual heliacal rising of the fixed star Sirius, which indicated basically in the middle of the summer when the Nile would flood. And this was used to mark the beginning of the Egyptian new year. So that was deeply, deeply important to the Egyptian tradition. And what’s kind of relevant for our purposes with later Hellenistic astrology is that the annual flooding of the Nile River would coincide with midsummer, basically, in the northern hemisphere, which roughly aligns with the time when the Sun was in the zodiacal sign of Leo, and then the heliacal rising of the fixed star Sirius would take place in the early morning hours just before dawn when Sirius would rise up in Cancer, basically, in late July and early August. So this becomes a precursor potentially for the later doctrine of the Thema mundi where in this birth chart for the creation of the cosmos the Sun is said to be in Leo, and Cancer is said to be rising up over the eastern horizon and the rising sign. So that creates a precedent then, as we saw earlier in the Mesopotamian tradition, for Cancer and Capricorn to be important – an important axis of zodiacal signs. And now we also have an important reason that Cancer rising and the Sun in Leo could be important in the earlier Egyptian tradition as well. 

All right. So for a long time in academic discussions, especially due to Otto Neugebauer, who did a lot of work on Egyptian astronomy and astrology, the Egyptians were treated as – like, the decans were just treated as being only for timekeeping purposes and things like that, and it was treated as not having astrological significance for the most part. However, in the past 20 years or so, some of those views have really changed significantly, especially after a discovery of this ancient Egyptian text essentially called the Naos of the Decades, which dates to I think around the 4th century BCE, but it’s drawing on earlier material. And in this text, we can see that the decans are being used for mundane astrology functionally where they can predict events like diseases, wars, or famines. And there’s been a lot of really interesting work done on the Naos of the Decades over the course of the past 20 years, including entire monographs dedicated to it. One of them is by von Bomhard, and it’s an amazing book I’d recommend everybody check out.

So the decans start to have some astrological significance. There also may be earlier hints of this because there were little talismans made of the decans that date back to even before that, which some Egyptologists have pointed out recently. And there are still new things, I think, emerging so that our understanding of the astrological tradition in Egypt has really been growing by leaps and bounds, especially with new archaeological discoveries over the course of the past few decades. 

So similar to Mesopotamia, one of the important things about Egypt and astrology there is the Egyptian priesthoods, and that there was this specific class of Egyptian priests who lived in the temples who were called the hour watcher priests. And it was their job to track time and to be competent, not just in astronomy but also eventually also in astrology once astrology started being used in the Egyptian temples as well. During the late period certainly by the astrological use of the decans like we see in the Naos of the Decades, but then later on in the Hellenistic period forward, at least from the first century BCE forward, there’s increasing evidence of the Egyptian priests practicing natal astrology and reading birth charts for people, basically. And one of the things that I wanted to point out here is that just like in Mesopotamia where we had the astrologer-priests, in Egypt they’re very similar in that it’s like, this elite class of literate, highly educated scholars who can read and write and that writing and the preservation of texts and literature and a lot of the things that go along with that was very integral to their identity and who they were. And these were, like, some very intelligent people that were living in the temples and practicing astronomy and also eventually astrology. So in later periods, these priests eventually also were conversant not just with religion and with traditional religious doctrines in Egypt, but also in terms of what we might associate more with what we might call philosophy as well, where especially after we start having more of a merging of Greek and Egyptian culture, the way that the Greeks talked about philosophy and things like that, there is evidence of Egyptian priests, like especially for example the first century priest Chaeremon who were treated as not just priests but also philosophers. And Chaeremon in particular was said to be a Stoic philosopher, so he may have had Stoic inclinations in addition to being an Egyptian priest. And there’s this really brilliant book that I was just rereading recently by Marina Escolano Poveda that goes into all of this with the Egyptian priesthood much more, and it’s titled The Egyptian Priests of the Greco-Roman Period, and I cannot recommend that book highly enough. I’m still processing a lot of the important ways in which she really dives into and looks at the evidence in order to truly understand what the Egyptian priesthood was about. But also the ways eventually in which it fed into the Hermetic tradition, both in terms of Hermetic philosophy, but also in terms of the technical Hermetica as well, which includes astrology and magic and alchemy and other things like that. So great book. 

All right. So moving on to later in the Egyptian astrological tradition, at some point later in their tradition, the Egyptian priests started translating some cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamian astrologers and translating them into Egyptian and adapting those astrological texts and doctrines to fit the geographic region of Egypt. And some of these texts that they were translating and adapting were on mundane astrology that we know of for sure. There’s a late text – I think it’s called the Vienna Papyrus by Richard Parker – that’s an example of that, although there’s other examples of Egyptian astrologers adapting Mesopotamian omens to Egypt as well. So there was some sort of program of doing that at different points, at least by I think the 4th and 5th centuries BCE or so, if not a little later than that. 

Additionally, we see eventually late in their tradition, we have evidence where they started to incorporate the decans into natal astrology. So prior to this, the decans seem to have been used in the context of mundane astrology in the Naos of the Decades, for example. But then there’s this mysterious text known as the Salmeschiniaka – I can never pronounce it. It’s a very weird name. Nobody’s really even quite sure what the name actually means or is meant to convey. There’s, like, long scholarly articles trying to understand this text. But what we do know is that it seems to act as this crucial intermediary text that applies the concept of the 36 decans to natal astrology and the idea of birth charts. And in particular, it has a focus on the four angles and the four angular decans, especially the equal house angles, which is kind of interesting, which it attributes the significations of livelihood, injury, marriage, and death. And what’s interesting about this text is that it’s – basically it calculates the rising decan at birth, and then it starts attributing significations to a bunch of the other decans depending on where they fall relative to the rising decan. So because of that, this basically is a direct precursor to the later concept of the 12 houses, which does the same thing, but instead it applies it to the in the context of the zodiacal signs by basically saying whatever sign is rising at the moment of birth, that becomes the first whole sign house, and then the rest of the houses or signs of the zodiac, I should say, are assigned significations based on where they fall relative to the rising sign. 

So this mysterious text seems to represent some sort of intermediate stage before the development of the 12 houses presumably, but sort of like, feeding into or perhaps acting as a precursor to the later development of the doctrine of the 12 houses. 

Additionally, just like there was a doctrine of fate in the Mesopotamian tradition, which for them was especially in this legalistic framework, in the Egyptian tradition, there was a god of fate called Shai. And this was a preexisting concept of a personal fate that was specifically tied to birth, death, and the length of a person’s life. And I think this is really important, because it may have provided the conceptual soil for the later astrological association or the later astrological obsession or focus eventually on the length of life technique. And specifically in the Hellenistic tradition, from probably the second century BCE forward, we have a very important and influential text attributed to the Hermetic author Petosiris, that specifically seems to have dealt with the length of life technique, which I talk about and refer to to some extent in my book, because that seems to have been one of the early foundational texts on Hellenistic astrology was this very influential text on the length of life technique. But I think it’s interesting that there may have been some preexisting Egyptian concepts associated with fate that might have acted as, like, cultural precursors to that in some way. 

All right, so late in the Egyptian tradition, especially by the time of – they’re writing in Demotic texts pretty late, we have the priests and the temples start producing texts such as one recent text that’s been reconstructed or rediscovered known as the Book of Thoth. And in this text, it’s basically like, an initiatory text for the Egyptian priests where it’s structured as a dialogue between a divine sort of master as well as a student who’s often referred to as a youth. And I think this is really important, because this acts as, and it’s been noted that this seems to be some sort of early precursor to what we eventually see with the later philosophical Hermetic texts. That there was some sort of earlier precedent for this in the Egyptian temples where they had their own literature that was framed in a similar way between a teacher and a student as some sort of dialogue. And one of the things that I found interesting in this is – I was reading through it, more detailed recently, is at one point I noticed that the Egyptian priests, one of the things that they did is they worshipped an Ibis-headed god known as Thoth as the scribe of the gods, as well as the inventor of writing and wisdom and eventually astrological lore. And why I think this is important is at one point as I was rereading this text recently, I noticed a line where the master in the text, he refers to the priests in the temple Scriptorum, which is known as the house of life, he refers to them as “the Ibises who are here.” And I found this really interesting, because I think that this actually provides some insight into a practice that we see referred to later on and that they – I think the 4th century philosopher Iamblichus mentions where he says that all of the Egyptian priests were in the habit of attributing their texts to Hermes Trismegistus as part of showing that they were part of this, like, intellectual lineage within the Egyptian temples. And I think that this reference in the Book of Thoth to the Ibises who are here, I don’t know if that’s been noted by other scholars, but that seems to me like an early confirmation that what Iamblichus was saying was true. And so when we look at things in that context, we may then have a better reason for thinking that when some of the later astrological authors of the Hermetic tradition in the second century BCE started attributing their texts to figures like Hermes Trismegistus who was the Greco-Egyptian version of Thoth, basically, that they were doing that or when they attributed it to Asclepius or when they attributed their text to Nechepso and Petosiris that there may be behind that and behind the author of those texts who’s not taking individual authorship of the texts, but instead they’re attributing it to these figures, that may be signalling to us that these authors that are behind the texts, these hidden or anonymous authors, are part of this Egyptian or Greco-Egyptian priestly lineage of astrology that’s being practiced in the temples by the Egyptian priesthood. And this may be an indication of that and an indication potentially then of the ultimate source or the area where we should be paying attention to and looking for in terms of the origins of Hellenistic astrology, especially because we know the earliest texts of that tradition were this collection of four texts or so attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, Nechepso, and Petosiris. So that is the Egyptian lineage that feeds into Hellenistic astrology. 

All right. In this next section, I’d like to talk about the Greek contribution. So Greek mathematical astronomy only really starts to gain momentum from about the 4th century BCE forward and was significantly kind of lagging behind you might say compared to the advanced systems especially in Mesopotamia and to a lesser extent in Egypt. And eventually, it started to catch up around the time of the 4th century forward around the time of Plato and Aristotle and Eudoxus, primarily and especially through cross-cultural exposure to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian astronomical and eventually astrological traditions. So eventually, Mesopotamian astral concepts and Egyptian mythology started permeating Greek thought, and we can start to see some of this. For example, like, Plato has this random discussion of the Egyptian god Thoth in his dialogue the Phaedrus, which kind of like, stands out and there’s been these long-standing questions of even though there’s legends of some of the Greek philosophers traveling to Egypt and studying with the priests there, questions about to what extent was that true or to what extent were there legitimate Egyptian influences on Greek philosophy. But especially in Plato’s school, we do know that there was an influence that started coming from Mesopotamian astronomy and astrology with respect to the planets. And I’ll talk about that in just a moment. 

So one of the things that the Greeks started doing was conceptualizing the cosmos as spherical, as like, a circular sphere, as well as as a living being. And this becomes really important because one of the things that they started doing after establishing this notion of a spherical cosmos is they started trying to systemize it and understand the order of the planets especially. And in Plato especially we see these interesting discussions from Plato forward about the order of the planetary spheres. And this is something I just discussed extensively in my recent episode on the origins of the Chaldean order of the planets and the planetary days of the week, so I’m not gonna go into it in super detail. But one of the points that’s important is Plato sets up an initial planetary order which goes – his order was, like, Moon is the closest to us, then the Sun, then Venus, then Mercury, then Mars, then Jupiter, and then Saturn and finally the fixed stars. So that creates kind of like a foundation that philosophers seem to have followed until around like, 200 BCE or so where we see some Greek philosophers starting to reconfigure that planetary order. Like Eratosthenes moved the positions – he swapped the positions of Mercury and Venus so that the order instead went, like, Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Which is interesting, because that then is the planetary order that we see replicated in the Thema mundi, which would have been developed some time within decades after Eratosthenes. 

But aside from planetary orders, one of the major things that Plato does is he had this really important philosophical dialogue known as the Timaeus where he posited that the cosmos is a singular living entity or a living animal of some sort, as well as that the planets themselves possess souls as well as intelligence or like, an intellect. So this is really important, because the Timaeus was like, hugely, hugely influential on later philosophical schools, especially the Stoics who picked up the idea of the cosmos as a living animal or a living being. But also later traditions of Platonism – Stoicism as I just mentioned, but also Hermeticism. Like, Hermeticism seems to have picked up this concept of the cosmos as a living being or a living animal or even as a god, which is also the way it’s framed by Plato as a craftsman. And later, this may have been part of the justification for why astrology worked. And some of the later Hellenistic astrologers like Antiochus seem to allude to this concept when they refer to the Thema mundi not just as the birth chart of the cosmos, but also as the birth chart of god. And this seems to be under the premise that we start to see arise in Plato in the Timaeus that the cosmos itself is a living, sentient being or animal of some sort. 

Additionally, in Plato we have really important concepts that emerge connected with, like, fate, necessity, and the planetary spheres, where especially in what’s called the Myth of Er, which is like, this story that Plato tells at the end of his dialogue known as The Republic he basically connects the planetary spheres or the planets and the movement of the planets directly to the concept of fate. And what he does is he kind of like, visualizes the cosmos through this spindle of necessity, as if the cosmos was like, a spinning top. And this notion of physically turning the heavenly whorls of the planets were these three goddesses or the three fates, which were the goddesses Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. And each of them are also like – and each of the planets essentially are singing these single notes alongside the movement of the planets, from which arises this long-standing notion of the harmony of the spheres, and that there’s some sort of notion about harmonic ratios connected with not just the movement of the planets, but also their distances, which is something that’s very important because we’ll see that concept show up in Nechepso where the order of the planets, if it arose from the Nechepso text, which it very well may have and that’s one of the things I argue because the Nechepso text doesn’t just put the Sun in the center of the planets – like, move the Sun in the center of the planets compared to where Plato had it as directly after the Moon next to the earth – but the Nechepso text also, according to Pliny the Elder in the first century, set up actual distances between the planets and especially setting the Sun at the mean between the Moon at the closest extremity and Saturn at the outermost extremity, which set up some musical or harmonic ratios essentially in the very structure of the cosmos. So we see, like, early ideas of this in Plato, and one of the things that’s important is because Plato associates the three Greek mythological goddesses of fate with the planets, from Plato forward we see the planets increasingly becoming associated with the concept of fate. And one of the things about this in Plato is I don’t think he was just, like, inventing this out of nowhere, but Plato was living in a time after the concept of natal astrology had already been invented. And we know that it was in use from 410 BCE forward. So we know that in the Mesopotamian tradition that there were astrologers practicing natal astrology and making predictions about a person’s future or a person’s fate based on the alignment of the planets at the moment of birth. And even though we don’t see the concept of natal astrology fully show up in Greek astrological sources until the second and first century BCE, there’s gotta be some sort of inspiration here coming from Plato in terms of why he would go out of his way to start associating the planets with fate in this way around this time by the 4th century BCE. But what he was aware of or what he wasn’t, that’s a separate concept. But one of the reasons why I might be able to validate that a little bit is the naming of the planets. Because in Plato’s academy, there seems to have been some sort of program to name the planets after certain Greek gods. But in each of the instances, these names seem to have been chosen in imitation of the Mesopotamian gods that the astrologer/astronomer priests in Mesopotamia had already assigned to those planets essentially in Mesopotamian astrology. And in fact, Plato is the very first Greek source that we know of who in his dialogue in the Timaeus itself calls the planet Mercury – he calls it the planet or the star of Hermes. So this is the first time that a Greek author, as far as we know, associates the Greek god Hermes with the planet Mercury. And this seems to have been, because the Greek god Hermes was the messenger of the gods, and this seems to be in imitation of the Mesopotamian god Nabu who had a similar role in the Mesopotamian system. 

So Plato starts that project, and I did a whole episode with Demetra George I think two or three years ago where we went through all of this and talked about how the Greeks started deliberately picking out the names of the planets to match their gods with the Mesopotamian gods, which means that they must have started having some familiarity with Mesopotamian astronomy and astrology. But then these assignments are eventually completed not by Plato, but instead by his student whose name was Philip of Opus who wrote a dialogue that is known as the Epinomus. And in this text, Philip systematically assigned the Greek gods or deities to the rest of the planets in order to match their Babylonian or Mesopotamian counterparts. For example, following Plato’s assignment of Hermes to Mercury, but also other ones like assigning the Greek god Aphrodite to the planet Venus, which was in imitation of the Mesopotamian god Ishtar, who was also a god of love and things like that. So there was some sort of program then in Plato’s academy to match up those associations deliberately, and that combined with these allusions to associating fate with the planets in Plato, even though we don’t have a lot of explicit discussions about astrology otherwise, we know that the Greeks were starting to come into contact with and it was starting to impact astrology in other cultures, and Mesopotamia and Egypt was starting to influence and impact Greek culture in some way from this point forward basically from about the 4th century BCE forward. 

Okay, now we get to the last phase of the history section, which is the Hellenistic era. So what happened is that following the conquests of Alexander of Macedon or sometimes known as Alexander the Great from the 4th century forward, Greek-speaking rulers took over both Mesopotamia as well as Egypt because Alexander basically led an army of Greek-speaking Macedonians – of Greeks and Macedonians – out of southern Europe, went down through Turkey and conquered Egypt and then went over to Mesopotamia and conquered Mesopotamia all the way and kept going to the western most portions of India before turning back and then promptly dying in Babylonian. And then his generals basically went to war with each other and carved up his empire. But the end result is that there was a Greek-speaking ruler that took over Egypt, which is one of the Alexander’s generals named Ptolemy, and then there was another one that took over Mesopotamia. 

But what this did is that it brought the Greeks into much more direct contact then with these ancient cultures, which created a massive intellectual melting pot between all three cultures of like, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. And so it’s like, if there wasn’t already interactions happening around the time of Plato directly after this time, basically, there was because all of a sudden Greek became the dominant language in both Egypt and Mesopotamia. And as a result of that, for example, one of the things that happened is that in Egypt, the general Ptolemy set himself up as king and pharaoh and he founded a dynasty of basically Greek rulers in Egypt that took over and ruled in Egypt for the next few hundred years. Ptolemy and his son Ptolemy II also set up the famous museum and Library of Alexandria, and as a result of that, it turned Egypt into a central hub for scientific and astronomical research in the ancient world, as well as a number of other scientific type things. And one of the things that’s important during this period is, like, right away already, we see stories of Alexander coming into contact with the astrologers of Mesopotamia and them even potentially in some of the stories issuing predictions or warnings to Alexander, which he then I think didn’t listen to or like, sort of did; it’s not really clear. 

But during this period, during the Hellenistic period, when you have these Greek-speaking rulers taking over Mesopotamia and Egypt, during the next hundred or 200 years, you start getting stories about Mesopotamian astrologers leaving Mesopotamia and emigrating west, and then setting up shop basically and starting to teach the Greeks astronomy and astrology. So the most famous instance of that is some of the legends in the early 3rd century BCE, like around let’s say 280 BCE with Berosus and the legends that Berosus set up a school for astrology on the Greek island of Kos, and then that he may have had students who carried on different astrological traditions. And so that’s one very important thing, and we’ve talked about Berosus already a little bit. But we also even aside from Berosus because sometimes, like, historians try to dispute some of the astrological legends associated with Berosus, which I think they go too far and are too skeptical of, but even Berosus aside, we actually have other evidence of a different Mesopotamian astrologer who was a – there’s an inscription in Greek from the Greek town of Larissa which honors a supposed Chaldean or Mesopotamian astrologer named Antipater who supposedly set up shop and taught astrology or practiced astrology and astronomy in that area. 

So what we have then is one or potentially at least two instances of Mesopotamian astrologers starting to move west and starting to transmit Mesopotamian astrology into Greek sources. And that’s one of the most important things about the Hellenistic period is that because Greek became the lingua franca or the common language that was used by all these different peoples from a vast variety of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, it meant that people in those different cultures would sometimes grow up being bilingual and learning whatever their native language was. Like, for example, in Mesopotamia, learning to write in cuneiform or the different – like, cuneiform is a script, so the different languages associated with it, or in Egypt learning to write in the different forms of the Egyptian language, but then also sometimes learning or growing up using Greek at the same time. And so there was this process of, like, people that maybe were not ethnically Greek but who would speak and write in Greek, just like Berosus is known to have written a history of Mesopotamia in Greek. Or there’s a Egyptian priest named Manetho who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek. So that then starts informing what it even means to be Greek and informing Greek culture during the Hellenistic era where it’s just, like, this mixing pot of all of these different cultures. And it’s accelerated by this sudden commonality where there’s a shared language, especially for scientific and philosophical and astrological texts, which becomes Greek. 

So we have that. And then at the same time in Egypt especially, there is this Greco-Egyptian synthesis that starts taking place where the blending between Greek and Egyptian cultures becomes really profound. And that resulted in a deeply synthesized Greco-Egyptian society, and we see this blending showing up really vividly sometimes in later centuries. Like, for example, there were these Roman era coffin lids from a family called the Soter family, and it has this blending between different – they had different bilingual names of, like, Greek names as well as Egyptian names. They had mixed art styles of, like, Greek and Egyptian, as well as on these coffin lids a depiction of the Egyptian sky goddess surrounded by the Mesopotamian zodiac. So that’s just, like, one example of you can imagine some of the different people then from the time of Alexander the Great through that few centuries of the Hellenistic era where you start having, like, families of people growing up sharing in these common or mixing together these different cultural lineages, and sometimes being conversant in both, you know, Egyptian as well as Greek or maybe even Mesopotamian languages and Greek and so on and so forth. So that’s one of the reasons why in my book, for example, I talked about, like, what to call Hellenistic astrology and why I retained one of the traditional titles of Hellenistic astrology because it’s the type of astrology that originated in the Hellenistic era, which is basically the period from roughly let’s say – what is it – like, 300 BCE, like the 3rd and second and first centuries BCE. But part of the reason why we call it that is not just because of it, you know, instead of just calling it, like, Greek astrology, for example. If you just called it Greek astrology, then it wouldn’t recognize that there’s this very important Egyptian and Mesopotamian component. But when we talk about Hellenistic astrology, we’re talking about a historical era in which all three of these different cultures and their astrological traditions are mixing together in this really interesting way. So that’s something I really want to emphasize, and it’s something over the past 10 years that I’ve come into even greater awareness of and that wasn’t as clear even, like, 10 years ago because there’s been so many new Egyptian and Demotic sources discovered since that time, which has really shown how active the Egyptian priests were in practicing astrology and especially natal astrology in the temples. It’s really driven home the point that when we’re talking about Hellenistic astrology, we’re talking about a mixture between those three cultures. But there’s not really a good name for that, because like, calling it Greco-Egyptian-Mesopotamian astrology doesn’t really roll off the tongue. So this idea of Hellenistic astrology if we say that and take that to mean the type of astrology that arose around the second century BCE and that was a blend of those different cultures that were mixing at that time, and that’s one of the things that was just so characteristic about that time was there was this huge blending of cultures. 

All right. So continuing. Speaking of blending of culture, in the Hellenistic era we start seeing the Egyptian temples start displaying these mixed Egyptian and Greek and sometimes Mesopotamian influences that start showing up prominently at this time. And interestingly, a really prime example of this is the tomb of a historical figure, a priest named Petosiris who lived in the 4th century BCE who was a high priest of Thoth. Remember Thoth we were talking about earlier who was later associated with Mercury, the Greek god Hermes, and later the mythical sage Hermes Trismegistus. 

So recently, a scholar that I love, a friend, Justin Sledge, recently did a brilliant video on the historical figure of Petosiris on his channel Esoterica here on YouTube. And I would recommend everybody check that out, because it’s different for Justin because Justin was presenting it more as a video essay of an argument that he was proposing rather than his usual essays, which are more sort of stating the historical consensus about something. Instead, he was presenting sort of a unique take on something. But I really vibe with and I really agree with where he was going with this argument. And one of the things that he does is he really analyzed the mixed aesthetics of the temple of Petosiris from the 4th century that had these traditional Egyptian motifs alongside Greek artistic motifs that was showing this blending of cultures. And he basically proposes that this tomb and especially some of the didactic inscriptions that it contained that were talking about urging divine communion, for example, he said that this represented or he was arguing that it represented “ground zero for the early origins of Hermeticism.” And I think he may really be onto something there where it’s tricky because in recent times, academic scholarship has tended to associate over the past 20 years there’s been this emerging argument as some of the Demotic material has come out, especially an argument put forward by a Demotic Egyptian scholar named Kim Ryholt who tended to link the later astrological author of the Hellenistic astrological texts who named his text or attributed it to Petosiris. And Kim Ryholt made a very compelling argument pointing out that there’s this whole tradition of Egyptian Demotic literature that was connected to this sage named Petesis. And he says that this was the inspiration then probably for whoever wrote the Greek text and attributed it to Petosiris. And there’s some really good arguments for this, and I do think it’s true – I’m not really challenging that, because I think that’s a pretty obvious connection that he’s making, and it makes so much more sense to have that historical backdrop understanding that there was this literary tradition at least in the Egyptian language that we may then see reflected with a Greek author picking this name Petosiris. 

However, I do think that Justin Sledge may be onto something that the author of the Greek text also could have drawn inspiration in picking the name Petosiris from this prominent priest of Thoth from the 4th century. And one of the things that I – one of the reasons that I think that has been overlooked that might help to ground that in something more practical, and one of the things I suggested to Justin, is that I had always noticed, like, I don’t know, like, 20 years ago I got this translation of inscriptions, and it contains some translations of the biography of Petosiris from the 4th century from the actual historical figure from his temple, because he has all of these texts written – like, carved in hieroglyphs – on his temple, and one of them tells his biography and sort of his life story in a way. But one of the things that it says in hieroglyphs is that Petosiris specifically says or kind of boasts that he advanced or “exalted” the temple hourwatcher priests who were essentially the temple astronomers and astrologers. And while we have to be careful because this reference to lifting up or advancing the temple, the hour priests or the astrologers in the temple, is not isolated; there’s at least one other source earlier I think that claims that they did that as well. There still could be something here where some later astrologer basically two centuries after the historical Petosiris could have looked back on that as an important starting point or turning point or intellectual lineage in some way, especially if there was something specific that the historical Petosiris did in the 4th century BCE to like, recognize or emphasize the astrologers as part of his temple. And we don’t know what that is, because we’ve just got this one reference to him saying that, and we don’t exactly know what that entails. But perhaps there was some sort of program or something started at that time that some later group of astrologers, what, a hundred or 200 years look back on as significant in some way. And that’s something that I’d like to put out there as a possibility, just in terms of that, even though most of the scholarship over the past century has looked at that historical figure of Petosiris and said that there’s no connection with the later astrological author who chose that name in the second century BCE at the foundations of Hellenistic astrology, I’d like to propose when taken together with some of the arguments that Justin makes about some of the things that are almost, like, suggestive of some of the later Hermetic doctrines in some of Petosiris’s texts that there may be something there that could be more tangible that could link him up with the astrological tradition in some special way as well. 

So it’s all very highly speculative, but that’s a direction that I’ve been going recently, and I was really excited to see Justin’s video especially thinking along similar lines. 

All right, so let’s see. Other things to say about that before we wrap this up? The only other thing is just I think one of the things that Justin points out is that there’s actually physical evidence that later Greek pilgrims visited the tomb of Petosiris, and they left inscriptions or graffiti basically on the walls of Petosiris’s tomb, invoking him and referring to him as Sofos, which means a sage or like, a wise man. And they said he was like a sage who rests among the gods. And to me, and I think part of what Justin was arguing was that he’d already been mythologized by some Greek-speaking peoples as some sort of figure of wisdom or of divine wisdom well before his name was eventually attached to the astrological texts. Where, for example, the quote says, 

“I invoke Petosiris, whose corpse is beneath the earth, but who now rests among the gods: A sage among sages.” 

And this is like, written in Greek sometime after the temple was created. So there may have been some tradition there that’s more significant than has been previously recognized. And that doesn’t invalidate or mean that we can’t also take into account the Demotic literature that has these stories of Petesis that are obviously very relevant as well. But I think it’s worth it to keep an open mind as we’re trying to understand the cultural blending and some of the historical turning points that were taking place during the Hellenistic era that led right up to Hellenistic astrology, as well as to this question about the emergence of Hermeticism in particular, and the blending of the Greek and Egyptian philosophical and mystical traditions that eventually produced not just the philosophy of Hermeticism, but also the technical Hermetica as well, including the astrological texts. 

Now I want to transition into talking about Hermeticism and the early Hermetic tradition. So in Egypt, as I’ve just been talking about, there was this intense blending of Greek and Egyptian cultures during the Hellenistic period like never before. And one of the later products of this blending was the texts of what’s known as the philosophical Hermetica, which were works on philosophy and religion that blend Greek and Egyptian and other traditions together. And this literature is essentially revelatory. It’s revelatory in nature because it’s often based on some sort of revelation where you have these figures like Hermes Trismegistus or others who receive a divine revelation or wisdom, otherwise known in Greek as gnosis, about basically the true nature of the cosmos as well as the origins of humanity. And that’s, like, the core recurring theme throughout all of the different Hermetic texts that often tie them together. And there’s another feature of it is that there’s this recurring cast of characters that are often in dialogues with each other where you get figures like Hermes Trismegistus is a recurring figure, Asclepius, Tat, King Amon, as well as other figures. And the name Hermes Trismegistus is actually probably based on a literal Greek translation of the Egyptian idiom for the great, great, great Thoth, which kind of anchors that phraseology into the Egyptian priesthood potentially in terms of what that meant and what it was designating. 

So one of the other characteristic things of the Hermetic literature that’s very common is that it often features a teacher who’s revealing wisdom or gnosis, which is like, this experiential, salvific knowledge, to a student who’s receiving it. And then by the end of the dialogue, it’s like, throughout the dialogue, the student is asking questions; sometimes they’re not great questions and the teacher reprimands them and they have this back-and-forth. But eventually by the end of the dialogue, the student demonstrates that they understood and have received what the teacher was trying to pass down to them. And then eventually the student will often in the Hermetic texts go on to be an adept who passes that knowledge down themself. So there’s, like, this chain of wisdom or knowledge or gnosis from teacher to student that keeps being passed on after some sort of initial divine revelation takes place with the one who originally had the vision of gnosis or of wisdom. 

All right, so as I said, ultimately the goal of gnosis or knowledge or wisdom in Hermetic contexts is salvific in that learning the mechanics of the cosmos, the goal is to help the soul to navigate and potentially to transcend material fate and the material realm. And one of the recurring themes or notions is, like, having a vision that your spirit is from elsewhere, from this transcendent realm elsewhere that has sort of like, descended into the material realm, but that on some level a part of you isn’t from here. And that becomes kind of like a recurring theme in both Hermeticism and especially in Gnosticism as I discussed in an episode I did recently that should come out before this one that I did with M. David Litwa who specialized in Gnosticism and Hermeticism. 

So one of the things about this is that there was a core group of about 17 texts that are associated with what’s called the Corpus Hermeticum that have different tracts on like, Hermetic philosophy and dialogues and things like that. There’s also a number of other Hermetic philosophical texts outside of the Corpus Hermeticum in things like the Stobeaus fragments, who was a late author that preserved a bunch of excerpts of a bunch of Hermetic fragments that he thought were interesting that he wanted to preserve for his son. And there’s also a couple of Hermetic texts or a few Hermetic texts that were in the Nag Hammadi library, which largely contained a bunch of Gnostic texts or Gnostic Christian texts, but it also contains some Hermetic texts as well, including a really important Hermetic text called The Discourse on the 8th and 9th, which actually ends with some rules on electional astrology where it tells you to keep the teachings secret and to write them down at a time when Mercury is in Virgo and it’s either making a heliacal rising or setting; it’s a little bit ambiguous. 

But that goes to show some of the ways in which astrology shows up not just in philosophical ways, but sometimes in very practical ways, even in some of the Hermetic philosophical texts. And even though some scholars recently have kind of downplayed the extent of astrology in some of the Hermetic texts, it’s actually much more extensive when you pay attention to it than you might think. And we’ll get into that a little bit more here in a minute, especially with the technical Hermetica. 

So previous generations of scholars that especially in like, the early to mid-20th century often assumed that the philosophical Hermetica were written by Greek authors who were essentially pretending to be Egyptian. But more recently, recent scholars such as Christian H. Bull, David Litwa, and especially Marina Escolano Poveda argue that the Hermetic philosophical texts actually represent a more genuine Egyptian component than has previously been recognized. And I think this is so crucial and it’s so interesting, because the work these scholars are doing to analyze these texts in the case of Marina Escolano Poveda, she’s approaching it from the perspective of an Egyptologist who is analyzing these Hermetic texts and then pointing out pieces that are from legitimate Egyptian religious or cultural doctrines. And Christian H. Bull was also doing something similar, although I think from the perspective especially of the history of philosophy and religion, and similar with M. David Litwa. 

So one of the arguments that’s starting to arise more from some of these scholars is the argument that some of the Hermetic texts may have arisen from actual Egyptian priests who were well-versed in both Egyptian as well as Greek philosophy. And in some instances, there is authentic pieces of Egyptian theology and religion that may have been translated into the Greek idiom so that on the surface level it looks like it’s just Greek or it’s expressing common Greek philosophical ideas. But in point of fact, it may actually be behind that in some instances expressing things that are authentically Egyptian in some way. Like, for example, one of the ones that I found the most interesting that I think Christian Bull talks about is the notion in Egyptian religion that there’s this god, Amun, who’s like, this transcendent god in Egyptian theology that’s a hidden god that’s from somewhere else or that’s outside and hidden. But then there’s a god named Ra who is like, the visible god that’s connected with the Sun, for example. And then in Hermeticism, this gets translated into a transcendent god or Nous, which is known as like, mind or divine mind or consciousness or there’s many different translations of Nous. But this notion that there’s, like, a transcendent god that’s outside of space and time, but then there’s also a visible god which is either the cosmos itself acting like a craftsman or is represented by the Sun itself, which acts as like, the cosmic image of nous or the divine mind or consciousness or the intellect. And it’s interesting that in later astrologers like Vettius Valens, a lot of those concepts of, like, nous, god, mind, intellect and spirit and things like that get collapsed into the Sun especially as a significator in astrology. So that’s one of the things that’s interesting that’s sort of like, emerging and that a lot of new scholarship is starting to understand at that time is the possible Egyptian background behind the Hermetica. And especially in the case of Marine Escolano Poveda, the notion that the Hermetica – that some of the Hermetica is actually being produced by the Egyptian priests, and that these were people who were highly educated, literate scholars that had a background not just in religion but also in philosophy and that they were conversant in Greek philosophy just as much as they were conversant in Egyptian philosophy. But then in some instances, they were also actively engaged in the technical Hermetica as well, which includes astrology and magic and alchemy. 

So one of the things that’s important about the Hermetic philosophical texts is that they often take the existence of astrology for granted and mention it especially frequently in passing and especially in connection with the decans or in particular with the planets’ connection with fate, which in Greek is referred to as Heimarmene. And scholars in the 20th century developed this convention of sometimes distinguishing between the so-called philosophical Hermetica, which is especially those 17 or so texts that survived and were popularized, especially in Europe during the Renaissance, where these Greek texts sort of like, showed up and then were translated by Marsilio Ficino and then, like, helped to spur and contribute to the Renaissance. So scholars often contrast or distinguish between the philosophical Hermetica, which are largely philosophical texts, versus the so-called technical Hermetica, which are texts also that seem to arise from a similar cultural milieu and are attributed to figures like Hermes and Asclepius and everything else. But instead of being purely philosophical texts, they are on practical doctrines such as astrology, magic, alchemy, and other topics like that. So sometimes scholars distinguish and say, “Well, we’ve got the philosophical Hermetica over here and we’ve got the technical Hermetica over here.” However, it’s not really clear if this modern distinction between technical and philosophical Hermetica is a valid one, especially because these texts were actually likely produced in the exact same cultural milieu. 

And one of the points that I want to make that’s become increasingly important for me and increasingly evident but I don’t see a lot of scholars make this point, I think due to a lack of familiarity with astrology and because of how highly technical it is, but the texts of the philosophical Hermetica are commonly dated to the first and second and 3rd centuries CE. So they’re somewhat late in terms of the philosophical texts associated with Hermeticism, basically taking place, being composed during the Roman period where Rome had taken over Egypt from the late first century BCE forward. However, one of the points that’s really important and is not acknowledged as widely as it should be is that the very first Greek reference that we have to the figure of Hermes Trismegistus comes from the astrologer Thrasyllus who died in the year 36 CE. So he died in, like, the early first century CE, and Thrasyllus cites a specific astrological text that was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that was on the 12 houses that probably dates to the second century BCE. So this is really important, because one of the points that I want to make and argue here is that there was a collection of technical Hermetica that date to the second century BCE, and these were actually astrological texts. It was a collection of Hermetic texts on astrology that was attributed to a specific set of figures, including Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, King Nechepso and the priest Petosiris. 

So part of what this represents in terms of these astrological texts is it was really common during the Hellenistic era especially for authors to engage in pseudo-epigrapha, which is like, instead of giving your own name to a text, instead attributing it to a legendary or a mythical figure from the past for various reasons. And different scholars, like, argue over or propose a whole range of different reasons for this, ranging from really uncharitable ones of arguing that this is just to like, get greater circulation for a text, or to pretend that it has greater antiquity than it does, to more sympathetic or charitable takes, such as for example the scholar Garth Fowden who wrote a book titled The Egyptian Hermes that was really influential in the ‘80s who noted that the later I think 4th century philosopher Iamblichus said that there was a tradition among the Egyptian priests of attributing all their texts to Hermes in order to show that they were part of some sort of intelecetual tradition or lineage, and not necessarily because they were trying to act as some sort of deceptive forgery, but instead that it was some sort of traditional way for Egyptian priests to honor their lineage and to show some sort of continuity in terms of the divine inspiration and the revelation of insight into the knowledge or the gnosis that was being handed down, as opposed to, like, striving for individual authorial credit and sort of, you know, trying to take credit for something or some new idea or something like that in a more self-centered way or more egoic sense we might say. That they might have had a more positive spin on that and reason for that in terms of signlaling their intellectual indebtedness as part of their Egyptian religious and philosophycal tradition, essentially. 

All right, so this is something I’ve really been working on over the past few months this summer and a point I really want to emphasize, which is that this collection of technical Hermetic texts on astrology of at least four texts from the second century BCE, these texts already contain some of the philosophical principles and some of the common tropes that we’ll see come up very prominently in the later philosophical Hermetica. And some of these things include, for example, the mirroring of the microcosm and the macrocosm. So for example, these texts seem to have used and mentioned the Thema mundi or the birth chart of the cosmos, and Firmicus talks especially about how the authors Asclepius and Nechepso and Petosiris seem to have talked about it as this divine blueprint that you were supposed to compare and understand in terms of the microcosmic birth charts of individual humans compared to the macrocosmic birth chart of the cosmos itself. And that that had some sort of deeper both practical as well as philosophical or even spiritual meaning, especially since one of the astrologers, Antiochus, says that the Thema mundi itself was the birth chart of God. And that was probably in some sort of Hermetic or Stoic or Platonic conceptualization of the cosmos itself as being this living being or this sentient animal where you can see the visible body of the cosmos is like the visible world, but then it also has a soul that’s invisible and that’s infused throughout the cosmos. 

So already we see the mirroring of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and Firmicus specifically connects that with the Asclepius text, Nechepso-Petosiris text. We actually see the introduction of the focus on the seven planetary spheres and specifically this is important because the Nechepso text is – through the reference from Thrasyllus, Thrasyllus says Nechepso and Petosiris had a whole treatment of what the astrologers called the seven-zoned sphere, which is the descending Chaldean order of the planets. And this is important because this became the foundation of the later doctrine of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, which became so crucial to later Hermeticism and Gnosticism and later late Platonism, and even later Jewish mystical texts connected with the Tree of Life and the kabbalah, which integrated the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres in that specific planetary order into the Tree of Life. So we may see the actual introduction of this doctrine, of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, as well as the qualities that the later Hermetic philosophical texts would associate with the planets, in this doctrine essentially, which is huge. 

Additionally, we see a focus already in the early Hermetic astrological texts of associating the planets with fate and being the agents of fate in some way, especially specifically holding sway over the physical body and the material fortune of individuals through the birth chart. 

We also see the typical Hermetic dynamic of a teacher-student revelatory dialogue where the text – some of these early Hermetic texts are explicitly framed as divine wisdom that’s being passed from a master to a disciple. And the way that Firmicus, for example, talks about Hermes – he talks about basically, like, getting the Thema mundi from Nechepso and Petosiris, who are themselves getting it from Asclepius, who himself was basing it on Hermes Trismegistus. Or later there was a late Hermetic text that didn’t survive, but Abu Ma’shar had access to this Greek text, and it was framed in the form of some sort of revelation from the god Agathodaemon to Hermes Trismegistus. So we know then that some of these early Hermetic texts, in the same way that we see the later philosophical Hermetica as being framed either through this revelation that Hermes or other figures are having, or through knowledge that’s being passed down through this student-teacher relationship, the first time we actually see that dynamic is in this collection of Hermetic astrological texts from the second century BCE. And it was through this interconnection of some of them being written in this premise probably of like, the Hermes text being a revelation from something – potentially Agathodaemon. Hermes himself then revealing something to Asclepius, and the Asclepius text probably being written under the premise of a revelation from Hermes. Then you might have the Nechepso and Petosiris text where the way Firmicus talks about it, he talks about it as if they were receiving revealed wisdom from Asclepius, and so on and so forth. 

Additionally, one of the themes that comes up in these early Hermetic – astrological texts is like, the nocturnal vision or this idea of, like, a mystical trance of some sort in order to achieve this revealed wisdom. So receiving technical knowledge through revealed – through mystical revelation essentially, this comes up with the Nechepso text because there’s this passage in Vettius Valens where Nechepso describes this vision where he’s gazing into the night sky and receiving some sort of revelation from a cosmic voice that’s wrapped in a blue cloak. And this seems to be very similar and seems to echo the way that the first book of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres, is similarly almost this dream or this vision that Hermes has of some sort of, like, undisclosed figure that starts to reveal the nature of the cosmos to him. And I’ll talk about that more later when I circle back and talk about these texts in more detail when I talk about the Nechepso text. 

The final thing, because there’s many things, but the last thing I wanted to mention here also is the connection between sympathetic magic and medicine where already in one of the early Nechepso texts, this really core occult principle that “one nature is overcome by another nature” is recorded in Firmicus Maternus, who attributes that to Nechepso. And this evidently occurred within the context of some sort of discussion about using contrary natural powers in order to remedy illnesses that are caused by the decans. And what this does is it shows that some of the later foundational Hermetic alchemical principles, as well as, like, medical astrological or Hermetic principles and tropes were already present in the Nechepso text dating back to the second century BCE. So this is just, like, a collection of some of the ones specifically that stand out to me that I’ve flagged, but an exploration of what other Hermetic philosophical and metaphysical concepts which show up in the later philosophical Hermetica are already there in the early astrological Hermetica in the second century BCE is like, a very interesting subject that I want to explore more, and that I think would be very fruitful in that there’s actually other connections that one would make as well. So perhaps I’ll save that for a follow-up episode, especially as I continue to research this further and yeah, if people would be interested in hearing more about that, let me know in the YouTube comments and perhaps I’ll do a follow-up episode. 

All right. So what I want to close out this section by saying then, to like, bring this section to a conclusion, is just that in point of fact, because these four or so astrological texts, these Hermetic astrological texts from the second century BCE are the earliest Hermetic texts that we know of, they may actually represent the original technical and philosophical school of Hermeticism, or maybe, you know, Justin Sledge when he was talking about Petosiris, the historical Petosiris in the 4th century BCE being like, the potential ground zero for the early development of Hermeticism, I think we have here for sure by the second century BCE in the astrological tradition what looks like it really is the first iterations of Hermeticism in a very tangible way where you can point to specific concepts in these techniques or in these texts that show up and would be extremely prominent and influential in the later philosophical Hermetica from the first and second and 3rd centuries CE. 

So if this is true, if this argument that I’m making is true, then it has really important implications for not just the history of astrology, but also the history of philosophy and the history of religion, because of the incredibly striking and influential ways that some of the Hermetic doctrines – like, especially the doctrine of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres – how that ended up impacting a bunch of later philosophical and religious traditions. 

In this next section, I want to talk about the four foundational Hermetic astrological texts that were composed in the second century BCE and lie at the very heart of Hellenistic astrology. So I built the case for the identification of these four foundational texts at different points throughout my book on Hellenistic astrology which I published in 2017. And it’s part of the unique argument that I made in my book, but I wanted to explain that and summarize but also expand on some of that here, because I think it’s incredibly important to understand especially for scholars who are working in this area on the Hermetic tradition and in terms of Hermeticism in general, as well as the philosophical Hermetica. So and at this point, what we transition into is the area that’s more of my speciality in terms of Hellenistic astrology and specifically the techniques and texts and technical constructs of Hellenistic astrology. So this is probably my most unique contribution that I’d like to really contribute to ongoing scholarship in this area, especially when it comes to the history of ancient astrology and the history of ancient Hermeticism. 

The first text, and by far the most important text, that I want to talk about is the astrological text on the 12 houses that was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. So multiple authors of the Hellenistic astrological tradition, multiple Greco-Roman authors from the first century CE through the 5th or 6th century CE attribute a text on the 12 houses to Hermes Trismegistus explicitly. And this includes especially Thrasyllus, who mentions Hermes Trismegistus by name, and then gives a list of the significations for the 12 houses that’s unique according to Hermes. And Thrasyllus is our – remember, is a super early source, because we know for sure that he died in the year 36 CE. So that means he was writing his text, which unfortunately we only have a summary of, but he was writing it sometime in either the late first century BCE or the early first century CE. So Thrasyllus is our earliest witness to this text. But in the text of Dorotheus, it also mentions Hermes in connection with this text on the houses. And then finally, Rhetorius of Egypt also has an implicit reference to this text and its attribution to Hermes as well. 

So this text and the technique that it introduced was known as the dodecatropos, which if you translate that literally from Greek, it means the 12 turning, or another way of translating it would be the 12-fold way. But basically, it was a text which seems to have introduced potentially – it’s the earliest text that we know of that has a set of significations or meanings for each of the 12 houses. And potentially, like, one of the things that I’ve proposed is that since this is the earliest text that we know of that talks about this concept, then my proposal is that I believe that this was potentially the first text in the astrological tradition that introduced this concept of the 12 houses to begin with. And specifically, it seems to have introduced the concept within the context of what’s known today as whole sign houses, where you calculate what the rising sign is or what sign of the zodiac the Ascendant is in, and then whatever sign of the zodiac that is, that becomes the first house. And then the sign after that going downwards or counterclockwise is the second house. The sign after that is the 3rd house. The sign after that is the 4th house, and so on and so forth. So there end up being 12 signs and 12 houses, because originally the 12 houses were meant to coincide with the 12 signs of the zodiac. 

So this text introduced a set of significations for the 12 houses. It also seems to have introduced two other things, because this text as Thrasyllus cites it, it already has what became the standard names for the houses in the Hellenistic astrological tradition, which included things like calling eventually the 9th house the place of god, and the 3rd house the place of goddess. Or the 11th house the place of good spirit, opposite to the 5th house, which is the place of good fortune. So these names are already mentioned by Thrasyllus as coming from this early foundational text of Hermes. And then all later astrologers would use these names. They became incredibly common in all subsequent Hellenistic astrological texts. But what’s interesting is that the names themselves are based on and derived from another scheme known as the planetary joys scheme, which is a system of assigning each of the seven traditional planets to one of the 12 houses. So for example, Mercury is said to rejoice in the first house, or Mercury is assigned to the first house. Jupiter is assigned to the 11th house, which is the place of good spirit, and that’s opposite to Venus, which is assigned to the 5th house, which is the place of good fortune. Mars is assigned to the 6th house, which is said to be the place of bad fortune, and that’s opposite to the 12th house, which is assigned to Saturn, which is said to be the place of bad spirit. And then I already mentioned the Sun is assigned to the 9th house, which is called the place of god, and the Moon is assigned to the 3rd house, which is called the place of goddess. 

So because the Thrasyllus text, because those names for the places are derived from the planetary joys scheme, one of the things I argued in a paper in 2012 and then again I believe in my book was that this implies then that the Hermes text was also the original one – that the planetary joys scheme is already embedded in this Hermes text since it’s mentioning the names of the places that are connected with the joys. But that also by extension probably means that this Hermes text was the first text to introduce the planetary joys scheme. And additionally, one of the things I think I can demonstrate that it was doing is that the Hermes text, once it had introduced the planetary joys scheme, it was deriving some of the significations that it was applying to the houses from the associations that it was making with certain planets with certain houses. And the one that’s the most compelling in terms of this is that according to Thrasyllus, the Hermes text assigned the topic of siblings to the first house. And this is a little weird, because in the later tradition, astrologers tend to associate the 3rd house with siblings. But what’s interesting about this and why it makes sense that this early text that’s kind of like, proposing this idea of doing 12 houses and applying significations and then deriving them – some of the significations – from the joys is that in that system of joys, Mercury is assigned to the first house. And one of the significations that later astrologers associate with Mercury is younger brothers or siblings. So that’s probably why the Hermes text then is attributing siblings to the first house because of that association it’s making or even introducing or proposing with Mercury in the first house. 

All right. So as I said, this text by Hermes on the 12 houses introduced a basic set of significations for the houses when derived from the Ascendant. And this text seems to have been drawn on by a wide variety of later astrologers, including Thrasyllus, Antiochus of Athens, Dorotheus of Sidon, Vettius Valens – his significations in Book Two of The anthology seem to be derived from this text, Paulus Alexandrinus has a long treatment of the houses that seems to be derived from the same text, and finally Variant One of the significations of the houses and Rhetorius of Egypt at the very end of the tradition in the 5th or 6th century CE also seem to be derived from this same text that all of these other authors are drawing on, because the Hermes text seems to have been not just a set of – like, a list of significations for the houses, but it also seems to have contained some delineations for what the houses mean, especially if different planets are placed in those houses. And what’s interesting is if you compare these authors, they all seem to be drawing on some sort of similar underlying source text, and I believe it is this original text from the second century BCE attributed to Hermes on the 12 houses. 

So according to Thrasyllus, here are the significations of each of the houses according to Hermes. So according to Thrasyllus, he says the first house is called the helm, and it signifies the soul of the native as well as fortune, way of life, and siblings. The second house is said to signify hopes or expectations. The 3rd house is said to signify actions and siblings. The 4th house it says signifies slaves, paternal possessions, and the foundation of happiness. The 5th house is said to signify good fortune. The 6th house, it’s a little ambiguous, but it seems to say daemonic fortune, which may refer when later astrologers received this doctrine, they would call the 6th house the place of bad fortune, which may be what’s referred to here. And according to Thrasyllus, the Hermes text attributed significations such as punishment and injury to this house. The 7th house according to Hermes signified death as well as the wife. The 8th house signifies life as well as livelihood. The 9th house is travel and living abroad. The 10th house is fortune, livelihood, life, children, procreation, occupation, esteem, authority, and ruling. The 11th house is simply said to be good spirit, whereas the 12th house is said to be called the place of bad spirit, and it’s also said to be the pre-ascension and said to signify livelihood and supposedly the submission of slaves. 

So this is the original set of significations, I believe, that was first introduced by this author, whoever the author is behind this text that they attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. That it was this singular text that proposed this idea of deriving significations of each of the 12 houses based on the signs of the zodiac relative to the rising sign. And again, that may have been drawing inspiration if there was hypothetically an earlier Egyptian tradition that was already doing this with respect to the decans, where we saw in the Salmeschiniaka the idea of looking at, like, a rising decan and then applying the concept of different areas of the life to different decans based on their relative position to the rising decan, then that potentially as long as that concept is a precursor rather than something that’s coming after this, then that decan precursor may have preceded this and then influenced the idea of somebody in the middle of the second century BCE proposing to do the same thing, but instead to do it within the framework of the 12 signs of the zodiac. 

So one of the things that’s tricky about this, though, is because the planetary joys are already implicitly in this text, it means that there’s a bunch of concepts that it’s already taking into account. And we’ll talk about a bunch of these later, but there’s a bunch of concepts like the concept of angular triads, which is angular, cadent, and succedent houses are already being taken into account in this conceptualization if the planetary joys are present. The concept of sect, which is the difference between day and night charts, the distinction between benefic and malefic planets, which makes sense because we already see in late Mesopotamian sources that the late Mesopotamian astrologers were already distinguishing between benefic and malefic planets, so of course any early astrological author in the Hellenistic tradition is gonna know about that concept as well. This text is also taking into account the doctrine of aspects, which is implicit in the joys scheme. It’s also taking into account the concept of the triplicity rulers, which is a form of rulership that’s very important, but it’s crucial in the planetary joys scheme because the planetary joys scheme partially represents the triplicity rulers grouped around the angular triads as I’ll show later. The names of the places are already in this text as we can see, where it’s calling the 11th house good spirit and the 12th house bad spirit. And the doctrine of good and bad places is also already implicit in this since it’s treating, like, the 11th house and the 5th house, for example, as positive and it’s treating the 12th house and the 6th house as fundamentally negative. 

So a lingering problem then that I keep coming back to over and over again over the course of the past decade or decade-and-a-half is that if all of those concepts are already being taken into account or are already implicit in this Hermes text because it already is introducing the planetary joys scheme, then that’s tricky because then it means that the Thema mundi and the domicile scheme may have already been introduced in it already as well, which would mean that most of the Hellenistic astrological system is either already in place or is actually being introduced or was introduced in this very text. And that’s really tricky, because we don’t have access to this text; it doesn’t survive, so we can’t actually fully see what it said. We can only make inferences based on fragments and reports from later astrologers who are drawing on this text, either one or two or three or four or five centuries later. But if a lot of those concepts are already implicit in the text, then it means that a bunch of them may have been introduced in a relatively short span of time potentially by the very author who was behind this text who attributed it to Hermes Trismegistus. 

So one of the things I think that’s important about that that may show some continuity though is essentially that, like I said earlier, Hermes Trismegistus became the new Adapa where I think one of the scenarios of what may have happened, because it’s like, honestly, we don’t know then who was behind this text or who was behind the collection of Hermetic texts, including this one and the other ones that I’m about to talk about. But I think that, you know, one of the scenarios or the likelihood is it’s somebody that’s working in Alexandria. With the Nechepso text, we know it’s somebody who’s being influenced by some of the intellectual trends, especially in terms of the types of verse that are being used by some of the leading scholars at the Library of Alexandria. So it may be people connected with the Library of Alexandria. But it also may be connected with the Egyptian priests and astrologers basically who are living and working in the temples of Egypt and potentially Alexandria at this time. And one of the things that seems suggestive is that they kind of created this new figure of Hermes Trismegistus out of the Indigenous Egyptian tradition of Hermes/Thoth and the god Thoth who was already, like, this god of writing and mathematics and wisdom and all these other things. But it’s almost like whoever created this created it in imitation of the earlier Mesopotamian tradition of Adapa who was this ancient sage that revealed the astrological tradition or astrological system to the Mesopotamians. And it’s almost as if one of the scenarios I have is that this system was created by the Egyptian priests almost to sort of, like, compete with the Mesopotamian tradition in some way, and in order to put their own personal Egyptian cultural stamp on it. And I think that’s true not just for like, the Hermes part – attributing it to Hermes or Asclepius or later Nechepso and Petosiris – but as I’ll show later, there may have been other technical reasons for that as well with the Thema mundi and, you know, reframing the exaltations from the Mesopotamian tradition that were tied in with the Mesopotamian new year being connected with the spring equinox versus creating the Thema mundi with Cancer rising and the Sun in Leo, which was tied in with the beginning of the Egyptian new year. There’s not just, like, cultural, but there’s also technical things that this group of Hermetic authors that may have been Egyptian priests may have done in order to put their own cultural stamp on this new system of astrology that emerged at this time. And that’s one of the reasons why increasingly for me it’s kind of like, putting the focus on somebody who is working or is connected with the Egyptian temples as well as the Library of Alexandria and who has familiarity with both Mesopotamian astrology, Egyptian astrology, and also potentially Greek philosophy and mathematics and astronomy who’s trying to create something new, but is doing it partially by remixing concepts from the past and synthesizing them together, and then creating a new technical construct surrounding that. 

So that’s the most important thing is that there was this text on the 12 houses attributed to Hermes right at the start of the Hellenistic astrological tradition. Like, an actual text, not a legendary one, not a mythical one, but one that later astrologers were actually citing for very specific doctrines and in which you can see multiple astrologers reporting on what was in this text and saying the same or similar things. 

Now, you know, that being said, there were other texts attributed to Hermes as well, some of them quite late. Like, other late astrological texts attributed to Hermes. But my point here is that what’s important for our purposes is to recognize and to identify this specific foundational text on the dodecatropos or the 12 turning that introduced this initial set of significations for the 12 houses and also clearly seems to have introduced the doctrine of the planetary joys and a bunch of the things that were connected with it, that this text lies at the very foundation and heart of the Hellenistic astrological tradition, and therefore needs to be recognized as a legitimate Hermetic text unto itself on some level in terms of the tradition of the technical Hermetica that may have also fed into the philosophical Hermetica. 

Okay. Next we move onto the text attributed to Asclepius, and this is a text that covered a system known as the octotropos, which was a system of assigning significations to the first eight houses in zodiacal order. And what it was is for a while in the early 20th century, some academics mistakenly thought that this system of the octotropos divided the entire birth chart into eight houses instead of 12. But in fact, what it was and what I believe most scholars agree at this point is that the octotropos instead of dividing the entire chart into eight, instead it was just a system for assigning a unique set of significations to the first eight houses in zodiacal order, and that it built on the system that was already introduced in the Hermes text , which was like, the first proposal about what the initial system of 12 houses should look like. And for some reason, there was this other author that came along some time after the Hermes text, probably still in the second century BCE, probably part of the same Hermetic school potentially, that modified some of the significations and added new ones. So it’s kind of like what I think about with this text, I think it was like, somebody potentially connected with the same Hermetic school of astrologers or something like that who said, “That’s a really good idea,” the Hermes idea of dividing the chart into 12 houses based on the signs, and then attributing meaning to each of those sectors based on their position relative to the rising sign. But the Asclepius said, “I want to introduce some additional significations based on some other ideas that I have, as well as to modify some significations that Hermes proposed.” 

So the octotropos is mentioned by a bunch of authors, especially early ones. But the author of the Michigan Papyrus explicitly attributes the octotropos to Asclepius. And that’s incredibly important because that identification and knowing that the octotropos comes from the text attributed to Asclepius helps us to understand part of what’s going on in some later authors, including Valens and Firmicus who both drew on the Asclepius text for some of their treatment of the 12 houses. 

All right, so one of the defining features of the set of significations that the Asclepius text gives is that it explicitly attributes all of the different members of a person’s family to one of the first eight houses. And Robert Schmidt pointed out that this is one of the things that made the octotropos or the eight-fold system unique, and it’s one of the motivations of why this author, the author behind the Asclepius text, may have introduced it or proposed it, because it felt like different members of a person’s family should be recognized in some of the different houses in a person’s birth chart. Additionally, one of the things that the octotropos does is it interestingly it takes the topic of death, which the Hermes text attributed to the 7th house, and the Asclepius text moves the topic of death to the 8th house. So it’s actually, like, modifying or changing – it’s proposing to change some of the significations of what the Hermes text had originally proposed. And what’s interesting about that is a lot of the later Hellenistic authors tended to agree with the modification that the Hermes text proposed at this point and a bunch of them do assign the topic of death primarily to the 8th house rather than the 7th house. So in some instances, the Asclepius text became very influential or potentially even more influential in some ways than the Hermes text for some reason. But in other areas, there’s actually overlap where the Asclepius text keeps similar significations for certain houses and retains some of the significations that Hermes gave. So for example, the 6th house, I believe Hermes attributes to the topic of injury, and likewise that’s the primary signification that the Asclepius text attributes to the 6th house. So according to the Thrasyllus summary, which again, the Thrasyllus summary mentions the octotropos and it mentions the significations associated with it, and here’s those significations. So it says, according to Thrasyllus, that the octotropos gives the first house signifying the topic of life. The 2nd house signifies livelihood. The 3rd house signifies siblings. The 4th house parents. The 5th house children. The 6th house injury. The 7th house wife. And the 8th house signifies fortune and death. So I cite this – there’s later authors that give significations for the octotropos like Firmicus or other people like that. But I cite this one from Thrasyllus just because, again, Thrasyllus is such an early source from – he’s writing sometime before 36 CE. And one of the things that’s interesting is he mentions the Hermes text and the significations it gives for the 12 houses separately from this list of significations that it gives for the octotropos. And we know why now, because these were two different early foundational astrological texts that gave significations for the 12 houses, and also potentially outlined delineations for what it meant when different planets were placed in those houses in the birth chart as well. 

So Robert Schmidt in his work pointed out that early authors like Thrasyllus or Antiochus, for example, will tend to present the dodecatropos of Hermes and the octotropos of Asclepius entirely separately because they originated from separate texts or separate authors. But later authors will have a tendency sometimes to synthesize and merge those two different traditions together into a singular system. Like, there’s a tendency for Valens to do that in certain portions of his work, for example, like in Book Four of The Anthology. 

And what’s interesting about the Asclepius text and the reason that made it unique and important and influential in the astrological tradition is not just because it introduced a system of significations for the first eight houses, but also because it introduced the concept of equal houses as well as a technique known as derived houses or derived places. So I talked about this extensively in my book in the house division chapter, but the Asclepius text appears to have introduced the concept of equal houses, which involves calculating the houses not just by whole sign like the Hermes text seemed to have, but instead by calculating the exact degree of the Ascendant and then measuring exactly 30 degrees downwards, and at the end of that 30 degrees, that’s the end of the first house. And then the next 30 degrees is the second house, and the next 30 degrees is the 4th house and so on and so forth. 

So in that system, the Midheaven is, like, the 90-degree point exactly upwards from the Ascendant. And the Asclepius text seems to have advocated the use of equal houses together with whole sign houses as some sort of secondary overlay together with the whole sign house approach that the Hermes text outlined. And this is really evident I showed in my book in Firmicus Maternus who draws on the Asclepius text as well as in what I call Variant Two in the delineations of the houses from Rhetorius of Egypt. Because basically, Rhetorius is unique where he has this huge chapter on the meanings of the houses, and he goes through systematically and he gives one set of meanings, the first set, which seems to be derived from the Hermes text that he shares in common with, like, Valens and Dorotheus and other authors. But then after he gives the significations of a house initially, Rhetorius will then introduce a second set of significations, and that second set of significations seems to be derived from the Asclepius text, and it matches very closely the same set of significations that Firmicus gives. But I don’t think it’s because Rhetorius is drawing on Firmicus, but instead it’s because both of them are drawing on the same underlying source text, which is the Asclepius text. 

So one of the things that both Firmicus and Rhetorius seem to emphasize when they’re drawing on the Asclepius text is they keep talking about the houses in terms of houses by sign versus houses by degree and sort of emphasizing not just the whole sign houses but also that planets can be made more prominent when they’re also angular, especially by degree to the degree of an angle, especially the degree of the Ascendant, the Midheaven, the Descendant, and the IC, using those equal house angles seem to be really, really emphasized. And I actually had a breakthrough with this this summer as I was researching this more and trying to understand what we could reconstruct about this lost text of Asclepius, because Firmicus actually gives the title of this text. Like, he draws on Asclepius so extensively, it’s one of Firmicus’s most important sources. And it’s one of the reasons why he outlines why Firmicus is unique in outlining equal houses very early in his work compared to other authors such as Valens who doesn’t outline equal houses until Book Nine of The Anthology, but right before he does so, he mentions Asclepius, and I think that’s Valens’s signal that he’s drawing on the Asclepius text in that section in Book Nine. And then when you read Valens’s synopsis that he must be summarizing from the Asclepius text, it very closely matches a bunch of the chapters in Book Two of Firmicus in terms of Firmicus must be going through and basically copying a bunch of the same things from that text. 

So this is important, though, because like, Asclepius plays a more central role in Firmicus, and so equal houses and whole sign houses play a more central role together in Firmicus. But Valens seems to copy the Asclepius text pretty late in his work in Book Nine, and then all of Valens’s example charts, almost every single one of them, especially in Book Two, he gives almost a hundred charts, he really consistently uses whole sign houses in the vast majority of his example charts in The Anthology. And part of that may be that in Book Two of The Anthology when Valens first introduces the houses, he seems to be drawing on the Hermes text, which is the one that evidently originally introduced the concept of the 12 houses, but introduced them in the context of whole sign houses. 

So backing up a little bit, Firmicus – he mentions the title. He actually gives us the title of the Asclepius text, and it’s usually read by the scholars that did the critical edition and most translations of it up to this point, it’s read as – the title – as Mirogenesis, which means something like infinite nativities or countless nativities. But I found a really important note in the manuscript tradition – in the editorial tradition – of scholarship on Firmicus’s manuscripts this summer where an earlier scholar, and I’m forgetting his name right now, but proposed or pointed out that there was probably a type here. And the original title of the Asclepius text was actually probably Moirogenesis, using the Greek word moira, which means a portion or a degree of something, and it’s also the word for fate. But in an astrological context, it is the word specifically for a degree of a sign of the zodiac. So that means the title of the text of Asclepius probably originally that Firmicus was drawing on, the title of it was Degree Nativities, which makes so much sense and really helps to confirm one of my core arguments from my book, which is that the Asclepius text really did introduce the concept of equal houses and the very title of it was signifying that, because it was titled basically Nativities by Degree, because that was the special codeword whenever the Hellenistic astrologers, especially the later ones, start using different degree-based forms of house division such as equal houses or quadrant houses, they’ll start talking about calculating the houses by degree as opposed to calculating them by sign. So that kind of fills in a missing piece, and it also explains why one of the reasons why the Asclepius text became so important, because it was adding this additional level of specification and adding an additional modification to the doctrine of the 12 houses beyond what the Hermes text introduced, because it was also adding this idea that you should calculate the whole sign house, but then you can see which planets are even more powerful by also calculating the houses by degree and using those both at the same time. And a bunch of later astrologers, like especially Firmicus and Rhetorius, seem to have really loved that idea and really sort of gone to town with it. And then that becomes part of the reason why eventually later in the tradition, especially in the medieval and Renaissance era, eventually the astrological tradition shifts almost entirely to calculating the houses by degree rather than by sign. But that is another topic that I’ve talked about previously, like in my episode on the origins of the different forms of house division in ancient astrology or in Hellenistic astrology as well as in that long 50-page chapter of my book. 

All right. The other concept that I talk about in my book that the Asclepius text introduced that was really important is the concept of derived houses or derived places, which is where you take the chart and you can turn the chart – a person’s birth chart – and treat different houses as if they are the Ascendant, and that you can derive topics for different people in a person’s life by turning the chart like that. Like, for example, if you wanted to look at your chart from the perspective of, like, your children, you would turn the chart so that the Ascendant is at the 5th house, and then look at the houses relative to there so that the 10th house relative to the 5th house would be the career or the occupation of the children. Or the 11th house relative to the 5th house would be the friends of your children. Or the 7th house from the 5th house would be, like, the spouse of one of your children or something like that. Valens preserves a massive excerpt on derived houses that I believe it’s in Book Nine, and this is the section right after he mentions Asclepius where he seems to be summarizing the Asclepius text. So I believe that this is actually a summary of the treatment of derived houses that was originally contained in and introduced in the Asclepius text itself. And so that may have been part of the reason, though, for why the Ascleptius text only introduces significations for the first eight houses, because it was doing this process of turning the chart for different family members in a person’s life. Additionally, the system of Asclepius, the octotropos may have deliberately stopped at the 8th house partially due to some other philosophical or metaphysical reasons through perhaps this notion of, like, the soul descending into the body at the Ascendant, but then eventually the soul – and then descending into the material realm and going through life through the houses that are under the earth. But then once you hit the Descendant and the 8th house, that’s where he assigns death to the 8th house, and from that point forward the soul is, like, ascending back through the planetary spheres at the end of life. So that’s another possibility in terms of understanding some of the implicit framework that’s behind why you would have a system that’s just introducing a set of eight houses as a modification of the earlier 12 houses of Hermes through both that notion of the ascent and descent of the soul, but also potentially through that notion of doing derived houses and turning the chart at the same time, which may have been a unique contribution – like, the first time that this idea ever shows up in an astrological text in this text of Asclepius. 

So finally, the very last thing – last but not least – is Firmicus actually states that the Asclepius text also introduced or at least had a discussion of the Thema mundi or the birth chart of the cosmos. And but it says that Asclepius received the doctrine from Hermes, and then Nechepso and Petosiris also ended up in turn receiving the doctrine of the Thema mundi it seems like it says from Asclepius as well, if I understand Firmicus correctly. But long story short, it says that – like, basically Firmicus says initially he cites Nechepso and Petosiris as part of his source for the Thema mundi. But then he starts talking Asclepius, and it seems like Firmicus’s primary treatment of the Thema mundi may have been derived from the work of Asclepius. And what’s interesting about that – one of the things I realized this summer once I made the connection with the title of the book actually being Degree-Based Nativities is that’s why in Firmicus – Firmicus is unique if he’s getting his treatment of the Thema mundi from Asclepius, because in earlier authors like Antiochus, for example, when the Thema mundi is introduced, it’s just given as placements by sign, and it doesn’t mention them by degree. But for some reason in Firmicus, when he introduces the Thema mundi in Book Three when he’s talking and Asclepius, he gives specific degree positions in the Thema mundi for each of the planetary positions where he says the Ascendant was exactly at 15 degrees of Cancer, and the Moon in the Thema mundi was exactly at 15 Cancer on the Ascendant. And then the Sun was exactly at 15 degrees of Leo, which would also coincide with the equal house 2nd house cusp. And Mercury was exactly at 15 degrees of Virgo and so on and so forth. So I think the reason why Firmicus is somewhat unique in listing these exact degree-based positions that seem to be coinciding with equal houses is because he’s getting his treatment of the Thema mundi from the Asclepius text, which itself introduced the concept of equal houses and titled itself Degree Nativities, and therefore must have talked about and conceptualized the doctrine of the Thema mundi and tried to frame it in the context of equal houses. So that was another big sort of insight that I had this summer as I was trying to put all this stuff together and different pieces started falling into place. 

All right. The 3rd and 4th set of texts that I want to talk about in the last part of this section is the texts attributed to Nechepso and Petosiris. And this was a massive compilation of astrological material, and these two authors are cited so frequently in later astrological and even non-astrological sources in the Greco-Roman world that some later scholars in modern times referred to the Nechepso and Petosiris texts as “the bible of astrology.” 

So in terms of the identities of these authors, it’s like, sometimes Nechepso and Petosiris are mentioned together as a pair, which makes it look like they were some of the texts attributed to them were perhaps a dialogue between Nechepso and Petosiris like some later Hermetic texts. But then other times, it seems like there are certain texts where they are cited independently, where Nechepso is cited for something, like, for example, the Lot of Fortune, whereas Valens cites Petosiris for a different discussion of the Lot of Fortune. Or what else? There was a specific technique for determining the length of life technique or the length of life treatment basically that seems to have been attributed specifically to Petosiris. And it seems like there was some text associated with Petosiris that really dealt with that specific technique in general, which became the standard technique for the length of life among most of the later Hellenistic astrologers. So as a result of these things, as well as, like, with the previous two authors, like Hermes and Asclepius, due to the loss of the original source texts where unfortunately the texts of Nechepso and Petosiris don’t survive, so what we have to do is reconstruct those texts and what they talked about based on quotations and fragments from later authors basically or that are preserved in later authors in order to get a sense of what they cover. 

So in terms of their identities, recent scholarship by Egyptologist Kim Ryholt connects the pseudonym Nechepso that was attributed to this by whoever the author was behind this Hermetic astrological text, they think that it’s connected to and it was meant to refer to an earlier Egyptian pharaoh named Necho II, who’s also known as Necho the Wise or – yeah, I think it’s pronounced Necho the Wise. And Ryholt says that this may have been partially due to some sort of legends regarding an eclipse that may have occurred around the time that the previous pharaoh died, which then brought Necho or Nechepso into power. 

Similarly as I talked about earlier, Ryholt in the same paper connects the figure of Petosiris with a sage named Petesis in the Demotic Egyptian astrological literature. However, as I noted earlier, even though that connection makes sense and is probably one of the main ones behind some of this, I think we should still remain open or leave open the possibility that the 4th century BCE historical priest Petosiris was also potentially in mind, could have been in the mind, of whoever chose to use this name as the priest and the author of an astrological text in the 2nd century BCE. You know, like I said, perhaps somehow connected with the 4th century Petosiris’s tomb explicitly referencing elevating the astrologer priests. Like, maybe that meant something. Like, maybe there’s something significant there in that statement that became important in terms of the tradition that we don’t or can’t know about, but should remain open to. 

So in terms of the dating of the Nechepso and Petosiris texts, a lot of scholarship was done by astrologers in Europe in the early 20th century who were able to read especially some of the mundane texts connected with Nechepso and Petosiris and to like, infer dates and time frames that were probably referred to so that for most of the past century it’s been narrowed down pretty well that the Nechespo and Petosiris text was probably written somewhere around the middle of the 2nd century BCE. And this is why – it’s the Nechepso and Petosiris text in particular that allows us to narrow down the dating of the origins of Hellenistic astrology, because some of those texts contain things that are datable. Whereas the Asclepius text and the Hermes text on the houses, because so little of those survives, it’s actually very hard to date those more precisely aside from knowing that Thrasyllus, for example, is already mentioning these text sometime before 36 BCE, which then indicates that they were probably composed a century or two before that, which takes us approximately to this time frame of the second century BCE. 

But with Nechepso and Petosiris, recently in the past 20 years, the dating has actually been narrowed down even more by a scholar named Stephan Heilen who has done just amazingly brilliant work on the history of Hellenistic astrology in a bunch of different ways. But one of the things that he did is he published a paper a while ago now, almost maybe 15, 20 years ago now, where he was able to narrow down the dating of the Nechepso and Petosiris texts to the 140s or the 130s BCE approximately, because he points out that they were written – some of the fragments of Nechepso and Petosiris, especially the ones that Valens quotes – were written in verse. And not just in verse, but in a specific form of verse which is iambic didactic verse, which he points out had recently been popularized by the head of the Library of Alexandria. And that through the popularization of using this type of verse in instructional texts, in didactic texts, that this created like, a trend of using that type of verse in other fields to talk about other or to present other instructional works, and that the Nechepso and Petosiris texts seem to have taken, like, jumped in on that trend, basically, which Stephan Heilen then uses to narrow down the dating of the Nechepso and Petosiris texts to the 140s or 130s BCE when taken together with some of the other clues that other scholars had already established about internal dating and textual evidence for the dating of those texts. 

So the other thing that kind of helps us to narrow down the dating is that the Nechepso and Petosiris texts seem to draw on heavily – they talk about the rising times of the signs of the zodiac, and they seem to draw heavily on the rising times of an earlier Greek scholar named Hypsocles who was active sometime early in the 2nd century BCE – like, let’s say 180, 190, maybe 175 BCE, give or take – specifically in Alexandria. And what was interesting about Hypsocles is that he was the first Greek author to mathematically formalize using, like, breaking up the zodiac into 360 degrees of a circle, which had long been done in the Mesopotamian tradition but Hypsocles is one of our first authors or is our first author to do that. And additionally, Hysocles also he basically outlined – he wrote a short text on how to calculate the rising times or the ascensional times of the signs of the zodiac, which is part of what allows you to calculate the Ascendant. And what’s interesting in Hypsocles is he actually uses a zodiac where the vernal equinox marks the first degree of Aries. So he’s basically using a tropical zodiac. We have a tradition of a Greek mathematician/astronomer in the early second century BCE, like, let’s say around 175 BCE, outlining how to calculate the rising times of the signs of the zodiac using the tropical zodiac. And then because of this, that’s maybe part of the reason why it set a precedent then for Nechepso and Petosiris potentially using the tropical zodiac as well. And this is something I talked about a lot in a few digressions in the last episode on the seven-zoned sphere where like, Ptolemy, when he talks about why he’s gonna use the tropical zodiac, he says that the techniques make the most sense to him in that context, but also that he thought that that was the intention of the earlier foundational authors. And I think he’s referring to Nechepso and Petosiris when he does that. Or similarly, Hipparchus in his commentary on Eudoxus makes this weird statement that the tropical zodiac goes back further, and that the ancient authors used it, which doesn’t make a lot of sense since Hipparchus is writing in, like, the late second century BCE, except there was a scholar who pointed out recently named Victor Gainsbourg, I believe, and he pointed out that he thinks the reason why Hipparchus says this – that the older mathematicians or astronomers or astrologers used the tropical zodiac – he thinks that Hipparchus says this because he was drawing on the Nechepso and Petosiris text and being influential by it, and he thinks that Hipparchus is referring to Nechepso and Petosiris there, and that part of the issue then by extension is that the Nechepso and Petosiris text presented itself as if Nechepso was legitimately a Egyptian king or pharaoh who lived in the past during some sort of, like, golden age for astrology. And later astrologers like Valens especially really believed that. For whatever reason, when Valens reads the Nechepso text and talks about it, he actually does seem to talk about it and to have conceptualized Nechepso as, like, an Egyptian pharaoh who was an astrologer that lived in some remote point in the past during the golden age of astrology. 

So whatever this text, however it was written, it must have done a really good job of presenting itself essentially as like, ancient Egyptian wisdom, because then you start getting these weird things happening, such as for example – another example of this is Ptolemy where in the Almagest – later in the Almagest, Ptolemy talks about the different planetary orders. And he – I talked about this in the Chaldean order episode recently, but I’ll reiterate it here because it really helps to make the point more – when he’s talking about planetary orders and he establishes which planetary order he’s gonna use, Ptolemy adopts the Chaldean order of the planets, which puts the Sun in the center of the order of the planets. Like, right in the center. And what’s weird is we know that Plato and a number of the earlier philosophers and scientists from the time of Plato, from like, the 4th century BCE forward for a couple of centuries, we know that the dominant planetary order was, like, Moon, Sun, and then like, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And then in the second century, the Nechepso and Petosiris text seems to be the first that we know of that mentions and may have introduced or popularized the Chaldean order, or the order of the seven-zoned sphere, where the Sun is at the center of the planetary order. And what’s weird is Ptolemy in the Almagest when he’s talking about this, he says the order that places the Sun in the center makes the most sense to him, and that he thinks that’s the most ancient one – that the most ancient sources use the planetary order that places the Sun in the center of the planets, and it’s only the more recent authors that place the Sun right next to the Moon. And that’s kind of bizarre at first, because we know that it’s actually the opposite. That the Sun in the center is the later innovation. But then once you think about why he’s saying that, you realize why, and it’s because of the Nechepso and Petosiris text and the way that it presented itself as well as the fact that it was probably the text that helped to introduce and popularize the Chaldean order system with the Sun in the center, because the Nechepso text presented itself as an ancient Egyptian text from some time in the remote past. And for whatever reason, it was surprisingly successful in presenting itself that way, because Ptolemy believed it and as a result of Ptolemy believing that the Nechepso and Petosiris text was very ancient, he assumed that the planetary order that it used with the Sun in the center was also very ancient. And he assumed that authors like Plato must have lived after Nechepso. So that was something I’ve been, like, figuring out this summer as I’ve been piecing all of this together is once you understand hope the Nechepso and Petosiris text presented itself, and that it was successful in presenting itself as ancient Egyptian wisdom, suddenly all of these weird statements that different authors start making suddenly makes sense once you realize that the text was incredibly influential and successful as presenting itself as older than it was. 

So that’s a huge digression, but it gets to the heart of some things that are really important here about why this system of Hellenistic astrology took off. Not just as a system of astrology, but in that instance also as a system of cosmology fundamentally, because the Nechepso and Petosiris text was, like, outlining a new order of the planets that placed the Sun at the center, and then because that was adopted by subsequent astronomers such as Ptolemy, that became the dominant cosmological model for more than a millenia, more than a thousand years all the way until the time of Copernicus, basically, when that system was overthrown. 

All right, so one of the weird mysteries about the Nechepso text is that we have citations of a 13th, 14th, and 15th book of Nechepso that are cited by later authors. And Valens in particular cites, I believe, the Book 13 where he says that there’s an intro and then Nechepso goes into and starts talking about the Lot of Fortune. And Stephan Heilen points out that he argues that Nechepso’s text may have actually started with Book 13, and he basically suggests that it’s not that, you know, later authors, it’s not that we have these citations for Book 13, 14, and 15 and we’re missing citations for the earlier books. But instead, he proposed that this may mean that the Nechepso text was seen as a direct continuation of the book of Aslepius, which he presumed or suggested then may have meant that the book of Asclepius was written in 12 books. And so then Nechepso starts his as Book 13, and introduces the Lot of Fortune as some sort of, like, continuation of that series in some way. 

And I think – I’ve always thought that was an amazing insight, and one of the things that I was thinking this summer, and this isn’t, like, a strong proposal, but it was kind of like, an idea I was kicking around. But because the Asclepius text dealt with the octotropos or the eight-turning system that had significations for the first eight houses, I actually wonder if the Asclepius text didn’t consist of eight books, and then the Hermes text that came before it then may have consisted of four books. Because if that was true, then we would truly have, like, a sequence of understanding the connection between especially these three or four early astrological authors that were part of this mysterious Hermetic tradition or school of astrology, probably in Alexandria, probably some time in the second century BCE. And to – I was sort of like, looking around to see if there was any way to validate this, and I was reminded of this famous quote by a later Christian author named Clement of Alexandria who’s a Christian author that describes at one point – he’s living in Alexandria I think around 200 CE or something like that. But he witnesses a procession of Egyptian priests. And what’s interesting is that he says that one of the Egyptian priests, which is the hour-watcher priest, which is the astrologer/astronomer in this procession, carried four books with him, and they were the four books of Hermes that covered astronomy and astrology, basically. And so one of the things then that could have happened, and I’m just, like, putting this out there a little tentatively, but the four books of Hermes or let’s say the text attributed to Hermes, our astrological author who wrote the text on the dodecatropos or the 12-turning, that introduced the initial set of significations for the 12 houses, if there was already some sort of existing tradition among the Egyptian priests of having four books on astronomy and/or astrology in the Egyptian temples, which seems to be confirmed here or seems to be the case according to the eyewitness account of Clement of Alexandria, then it’s possible that the author of this astrological text on the 12 places could have imitated that by essentially writing a text on the 12 houses and whatever else that text covered which was divided into four books. And that’s, like, a little bit interesting, a little bit appealing, because then you kind of get echoes of that perhaps in Ptolemy, for example, centuries later who writes the Tetrabilblos in four books famously. But it’s speculative. 

Here is the quote, actually, from Clement just for the sake of it. So Clement of Alexandria says, 

“And after the singer comes the hour-marker,” which is the astrologer or the hour-watcher priest. He’s talking about this procession of priests. All right, so now I’ll continue. And he says the hour-watcher priest is “holding an hour-reckoner and a palm branch in his hand as the symbols of astrology. He must have the astrological books of Hermes, which are four in number, always upon his lips. Of these, one is about the arrangement of the fixed visible stars;” and then the text gets kind of garbled, so it’s kind of like a reconstruction, but one of the reconstructions I think says “the next is about the positions of the Sun and the Moon and about the five planets.” And then it goes on and it says, “The next is about the conjunctions and illuminations” or phases “of the Sun and Moon; and the remaining one is about their risings.” 

So you know, I don’t think those topics at least as far as we can tell in that garbled passage would match necessarily, but my point is that whoever was the author of the dodecatropos text, that specific text attributed to Hermes, may have been drawing some sort of inspiration from what may have been some sort of standard set of four books attributed to Hermes on astrology and astronomy that was established in some Egyptian temples, potentially in Alexandria. And that’s the thing that’s really interesting is that Clement is living in Alexandria in particular, which is really our likely birthplace and is widely acknowledged as our likely birthplace for Hellenistic astrology to begin with. 

All right, in terms of the major contributions of the Nechepso and Petosiris text and the specific astrological doctrines we can trace back to it, one of them that I’ve already discussed is the introduction of the seven-zoned sphere, which was either introduced or at least popularized by these texts as cited by Thrasyllus, who says that Nechepso had a treatment of the seven-zoned sphere and then Pliny the Elder in the first century also says that the Nechepso text outlined actual distances, like in miles, basically, or the ancient equivalent of miles, of how far each of the planets was from each other. So that it was describing more than just an order of the planets, but it was almost like, trying to give the size and distances of the cosmos at the same time, which to me is important because that raises the likelihood that this text or the texts surrounding it in this Hermetic school were actually introducing this system if they’re not just, like, adopting a planetary order, but if the Nechepso text is also somehow going into and outlining the sizes and distances of the universe – like, that sounds like a much more comprehensive cosmological text to me than something that’s simply rearranging the order of the planets. It sounds like a bigger and much more foundational text than I think people have realized up until the present time. And that was really one of my main thesis of the episode I released this month in August on the origin of the Chaldean order of the planets and the seven-zoned sphere. So check out that episode for more. 

I meant to mention I recorded this episode today on August 16th, 2026, and I started earlier today with Sagittarius rising. And I think I got – I caught, like, the tail end of the Midheaven in Virgo, so I think I started some time around 3:10 PM in Denver, Colorado, with probably nine or 10 Sagittarius rising and the Midheaven around 27, 28 degrees of Virgo, shooting for an electional chart today where I released the seven-zoned sphere episode earlier with Sagittarius rising under that election, because it’s one of the best elections of the month, and then I turned around and started recording this episode in order to catch that good election as well because it felt like a really important episode that I wanted a good electional chart for. 

All right. Back to Nechepso and the introduction of the seven-zoned sphere. As I said, the seven-zoned sphere seems to have introduced harmonic ratios which were connected with possibly music or harmonic theory. And previously, this has been assumed to indicate that there was, like, a Pythagorean influence, but instead, I think the Pythagorean influence, to whatever extent there was one, was actually coming through the Nechepso text itself that may have been taking into account notions of music or celestial harmony or other things like that, rather than adopting some other preexisting one. Because one of the things I pointed out in my last episode that I think it was, like, Walter Burkert if I’m remember his name correctly did a whole book on ancient Pythagoreanism and when he tried to trace this planetary order and some of the claims that it was Pythagorean – that the Chaldean order was Pythagorean in origin – he couldn’t find any validity to that basically. He couldn’t find any Pythagorean sources that actually talked about or introduced it prior to the second century BCE. And so that’s one of my other arguments for why I think it was introduced, that the seven-zoned sphere and the Chaldean order of the planets was actually introduced in the context of this school of Hermetic texts in the second century BCE. 

All right, so let’s keep going. The seven-zoned sphere and this planetary order had a crucial and profound impact in terms of the doctrine of the Hermetic ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres. And then, of course, also derived from the Chaldean order is the concept of the planetary days and planetary hours, which may then go back to Nechepso and Petosiris I argued in that last episode. As well as what became a common set of assignments of planets to the decans that uses the descending Chaldean order as well as later, for example, in Paulus of Alexandria a system of monomoiria, or assigning the planets to individual degrees of the signs of the zodiac also uses this planetary order. So there’s just like, once it’s introduced, you know, we don’t know how early – we don’t know how much some of those derivative things of astrologers applying the Chaldean order to the decan assignments or to the monomoiria, we don’t know how early that actually happened. And it may not have happened in, like, the Nechepso and Petosiris text itself. But once that system was introduced, it’s like, some concepts did start being derived from it in really significant ways. And the fact that we can trace it back to the Nechepso text is just incredibly important and striking. 

All right, let’s keep it moving. The Thema mundi. So Firmicus Maternus explicitly credits Nechepso and Petosiris with a discussion as well as the transmission of the Thema mundi. So that’s really crucial, because that means we can trace the Thema mundi back to Nechepso and Petosiris and also back to Asclepius and potentially, because he also mentions some of this doctrine coming down through Hermes, potentially back to Hermes as well. But at least we know for sure that the Thema mundi is being discussed by the time of Nechepso and Petosiris, which means we know that it was in circulation by, at the very latest, the 140s or the 130s BCE as Stephan Heilen dates Nechepso and Petosiris. It does raise an interesting question, though, about, you know, it’s like, what concepts were already introduced by the Asclepius text before Nechepso and Petosiris, and what concepts were already introduced in the Hermes text on the dodecatropos prior to Asclepius? And what are the dates on those two texts if we know that they’re before Nechepso and Petosiris, if it’s true that Nechepso and Petosiris are in the 140s or 130s? You know, how close or how far away are the Asclepius and Hermes texts prior to Nechepso and Petosiris? We don’t really know. Because there’s a scenario where let’s say this is a school of astrologers, and we’re talking about a bunch of excitement that sometimes happens in the astrological tradition where you get a new group of astrologers or a school of astrologers, and you get sometimes, like, a teacher or there’s a singular figure who’s coming up with or introducing a bunch of new ideas. And then you’ll sometimes have students of that teacher that get really, like, into that teacher’s work and they adopt the teacher’s system and then start using it. But then sometimes they introduce their own modifications or take the system in new and innovative directions after whatever foundation was that they learned from their teacher. And sometimes that can happen relatively quickly over the course of, like, a single generation or a single lifetime, for example. And that’s possibly in terms of this being perhaps these three or four texts part of some sort of school that’s happening in Alexandria that’s some sort of Hermetic school. Maybe it’s some sort of – maybe it’s like, a group of astrologers in an Egyptian temple that are all, you know, doing all this stuff. We don’t really know. Maybe it’s some group of Greeks or Egyptians connected with the Library of Alexandria. Maybe it’s somebody who somehow passes back and forth between those two worlds who has some sort of dual lineage. Like, we don’t know and we can’t fully figure it out, although I will say that the potential for more Egyptian – like, genuine Egyptian – priestly and temple influence is higher, is much higher than I recognized previously, especially in my book, for example. But which with all the new archaeological finds as well as the changing understanding of the nature of Hermeticism and the texts of the philosophical Hermetica, that really puts a new spin on some of these texts of the technical Hermetica as well. So it means we have to really be open to the potential that we’re talking about, like, a group perhaps connected with some specific Egyptian temple, maybe in Alexandria or something like that. 

But the question that continues to I don’t wanna say plague, but really dog me in different ways is the question of how much of these different pieces, like the Thema mundi, the joys, the tie-in with aspects, the seven-zoned sphere – how much of that was already introduced in this original Hermes text that was associated – that introduced the dodecatropos versus how much are there different pieces? And I guess we’ll return to that later when I get to the final section of this here before too long after this section where we actually start piecing together some of those diagrams. And you’ll see the issue that I’m running into, which is that a bunch of them are interlocking and interconnected in different ways which really makes it seem like, and implies, that large parts of this system were all created at once. Because that’s the only way to get the pieces to fit together or to be interlocking as cleanly and as dramatically as they are, as we’ll see in the final rousing section of this talk just after I finish talking about Nechepso and Petosiris. 

All right, one point that I want to mention about Valens’s treatment of the Lot of Fortune and how he discusses it – how he talks about Nechepso talking about the Lot of Fortune is that at one point, Valens says that Nechepso treated the Ascendant and the houses from the Ascendant as, like, the cosmic Ascendant. But then he says something about the Lot of Fortune and the houses derived from the Lot of Fortune as being the real natal Ascendant, or something like that. It’s very brief, and it’s always been hard to understand. But one of the things it’s raised for me recently is it may make sense in terms of some of the new archaeological research that’s been happening over the past few years where there are these collections of horoscopes that are being – birth charts – that are being discovered from the archives of this Egyptian temple, and especially this one astrologer who was working in this Egyptian temple and was calculating charts. And this author, this Egyptian tradition seems to have had a system for calculating the topics associated with the houses, but not calculating them from the Ascendant. But instead using a system of lots that we don’t really have full documentation for in the Greek tradition, but where they were taking some of the houses that were, like, in the Hermes text became fixed from the Ascendant, and instead those were, like, moving houses that could only be calculated through certain types of lots. And that’s kind of complicated; I’m not gonna get into it too much, because I realize this is gonna be a huge digression if I do. But one of the things I was thinking about is just that recently that this passage in Valens and how he’s describing Nechepso talking about this, it may sort of allude to this alternative Egyptian tradition that was calculating the houses using lots, basically, which is different than calculating the houses from a fixed Ascendant. And if that’s true, that could actually be some of the strongest evidence that the Nechepso text actually did represent some sort of unique Egyptian tradition or viewpoint, rather than that just being like, a surface-level thing that some Greek author was adopting, because the Nechepso text would want to be talking about the Lot of Fortune and centering that and bringing that into the conversation relative to the Hermes text and the Asclepius text that were focused on houses from the Ascendant, because that would have represented a more genuine current that was happening in the Egyptian temple astrology at that time. And you can see, in order to see some of that work that’s been discussed in those horoscopes that were discovered recently, you can see some of the recent work and papers by Marina Escolano Poveda and also Andreas Winkler, who was the one who identified the – like, that this system of houses was a system of lots that was unique and undocumented up to that point. And it was quite a breathtaking discovery. And one of the points that he tries to argue that I’ve been thinking about and going back and forth is that he argues that since the houses calculated based on lots are more complex and complicated to do, that he argues then that that must have been the original system of calculating houses, basically, and that the houses from the Ascendant where you’re just always calculating the houses from the Ascendant and then deriving the houses from there, especially using whole sign houses, that that represents a simplification or a simplified form of what the Egyptian astrologers were using with this more complicated way of calculating houses based on lots. So therefore, he puts forward the speculation that maybe the Ascendant houses came later, and that lot houses were actually first. And initially, when I heard that argument, like, I wasn’t that sure about it, and I wasn’t going for it. But there’s something there, or there may be something there actually that’s important or relevant. And understanding the relationship between the Nechepso text and the Asclepius text and the Hermes text probably gets to the heart of the issue there and could kind of potentially unravel what the truth is underlying that. But it’s worth exploring more, and I just wanted to mention that in passing. 

All right. One of the final major sections I want to mention here that’s incredibly important about the Nechepso text is that Vettius Valens in the 2nd century preserves this really remarkable passage that’s really important from Nechepso where Nechepso seems to describe having this direct revelation from the god Kneph, which was also known as Agathodaemon or Good Spirit, about the nature of the cosmos and the nature of astrology. And it’s really hard, because this passage is in verse and it’s very short, and the scholars also think we’re missing a piece of it. But basically, the context and what it seems to imply is that this passage from Nechepso seems to imply that some of the foundational math or concepts from Hellenistic astrology were explicitly framed here in this Hermetic text as being derived partially from some sort of mystical revelation from the heavens. And let me read the passage. Like, it’s really important, but it’s hard to get the full sense of it. But here it is. It says – and this is Valens who’s talking at first, and Valens says, 

“Just as Nechepsos testified, saying,” and then Valens quotes Nechepso in Greek in verse in the form of a poem where it says – Nechepso says, 

“I decided, then, to gaze in prayer all night long up to the sky” and then there’s probably a break in the text, and then it says, “and a shout sounded forth from heaven. Around its flesh a mantle of dark blue color was wrapped, stretching out darkness,” and then the quote ends. 

And Stephan Heilen points out that there’s probably a pun that’s imbedded at the end of this quote in Greek where there’s, like, a play on words where the word for stretching out in darkness is knephas, which he points out is probably a deliberate play on words with the name of the revealing Egyptian creator god who’s known as Kneph. And I thought this was incredibly interesting, because – and I think he’s right, actually, that this is a play on words and it’s alluding to then the potential that part of the revelation that Nechepso said he received may have been partially from this god Kneph or also known as Agathodaemon. And one of the reasons I think this is true is I actually noticed that puns like this, like literary puns, are very common in some of the Egyptian priestly literature and sort of esoteric or philosophical or religious literature, like especially in the Book of Thoth, which is this Demotic, as I said earlier, initiatory text that’s written in the form of a dialogue. There are, like, in the commentaries of this text I was reading over the summer, there are puns and hidden meanings all over the place where the author of the text – these, like, highly literate Egyptian priests – are just like, really going to town exploiting or embedding additional levels of meaning by using words that can have multiple meanings. And I think that this also sort of is what’s happening in this Nechepso text at the same time. And it’s evidence of then, and it’s another piece of evidence potentially, that this literature is potentially arising out of some sort of legitimate or genuine Egyptian priestly circle or milieu or context where things like that were common in terms of occult or mystical writings, to use puns and to embed meanings through words that can mean multiple things and are often meant to mean two things at the same time. Or that have, like, a surface-level meaning, but then have a secondary level of meaning as well. And I think that was also the case with the Asclepius text with that title that I mentioned earlier where the title was probably Moiragenesis, which on one basic technical level means like, degree-based nativities or birth charts by degree, but on another level the word moira also means fate. So it could also have this secondary embedded meaning of, like, moira as in, like, fate nativities or like the fated degree in nativities or something like that where it’s conveying double meanings or doing a sort of like, double entendre. 

So yeah. The last point I’ll mention here is just that I think the idea that the Nechepso text may have partially been inspired by some sort of revelation from the god Agathodaemon is actually confirmed, because we have a lost, late Greek astrological text that the 9th century Islamicate author who was writing in Arabic, Abu Ma’shar, had access to where in his greater introduction, Abu Ma’shar keeps repeatedly drawing on this text and he cites Hermes and Agathodaemon together in Arabic as he keeps going back to and referencing this text that he thought was very important and that he keeps – in many instances he’ll contrast that text with what Ptolemy says, but then oftentimes he’ll default to liking what the Hermes text says more. And it seems clear that whatever text he had access to was probably written in the form of some sort of either dialogue or revelation from Agathodaemon to Hermes Trismegistus, and similarly that may have been the case with this Nechepso text as well. 

I do think the Abu Ma’shar texts or maybe elements of it that might draw on an earlier tradition, but I didn’t mean to say that I think the text he had access to was probably dates to, like, the 3rd century or so. So I think it was a later text attributed to Hermes, rather than an earlier one. But I’ll save that discussion for another day. 

Okay. So the reason that that passage from Nechepso is important, though, is that this passage about Nechepso having this revelation probably from Agathodaemon is our first instance of what became a massive trope in later Hermetic literature, especially in the philosophical Hermetica, which is the idea that gnosis or knowledge of the true nature of the cosmos can only be revealed through the direct experience of having one’s own mind or intellect, one’s nous in Greek, one’s higher consciousness in some way as M. David Litwa has been translating it recently, or consciousness basically like, elevated outside of the bounds of the cosmos and outside of space and time in order to catch this glimpse, essentially, of the mind or the consciousness of god. It’s super common recurring theme in the Corpus Hermeticum and in the Poimandres especially, but this is incredibly strong evidence that some of the core themes of the later philosophical Hermetica were essentially already deeply embedded in the technical astrological Hermetica by the second century BCE. And this is incredibly important to me, because this is one of the, like, smoking guns that what we’re talking about here is not just a collection of, you know, technical Hermetica on astrology that has no relation to the later philosophical Hermetica, but we actually have some really strong motifs that show up that seem to be, like, core principles in some way and core dynamics or motifs in the later philosophical Hermetica that are already directly front and center and very prominent in terms of this collection of astrological technical Hermetic texts in the middle of the second century BCE. And that’s one of the most exciting things for me and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode is just to really truly outline that and emphasize it for the first time so that other scholars that are working on the history of Hermeticism can understand better, even if they don’t have a very advanced background in technical astrology, why these early technical Hermetica texts from the second century on astrology were important and may actually be tied into or could even possibly be in some ways, like, the source of some of the later philosophical Hermetica from centuries later. And the fact that this material is so early in the second century BCE, it really moves – it pushes back and revises our understanding significantly of how far back the Hermetic philosophical and technical tradition goes by pushing it back two centuries earlier than most scholars are usually used to thinking about or dating the philosophical Hermetica to like, the first century CE and later. So that’s one of the reasons why it’s very important. 

So the final question, though, is what was the revelation? What was the revelation that Nechepso or some of these other Hermetic authors had in the second century BCE in terms of astrology? And ultimately what it was is it was a revelation about the physical workings of the cosmos that were combined with this brand new, highly technical system of astrology. And this grand system that united everything together in this really unique and interesting and intricate way, and that is the system that we turn to next. 

All right, my friends. If you’ve made it this far, then we are now entering the final major section of this lecture where I want to focus on the conceptual constructs underlying Hellenistic astrology and specifically how the founders of Hellenistic astrology in the second century BCE, that collection of Hermetic texts, took some pieces from the earlier traditions but then combined them together and engineered them into some sort of new interlocking system. So yeah, if you made it this far, then you’ve passed the test of initiation, and now it’s time to get to the good stuff. All right, let’s get into it. 

All right, so first things first. We need to start with the exaltations, which as I said earlier, were inherited from the earlier Mesopotamian astrological tradition with the signs of exaltation dating back to around 1000 BCE where they show up in the astrological, astronomical text known as the MUL.APIN. So here’s a diagram for those watching the video version for the signs of exaltation, which for those that aren’t familiar with them have the Sun in Aries, the Moon in Taurus, Venus in Pisces, Jupiter in Cancer, Mars in Capricorn, Mercury in Virgo, and Saturn in Libra. So these are what is known as the – in the Mesopotamian tradition – either the secret places or the secret houses of the planets. But in the Hellenistic tradition, they became known as the exaltations. And what’s interesting is that in referring to the exaltations as “secret houses,” it seems to already have this concept of, like, a house or a place and associating that with a certain part of the sky or a certain zodiacal constellation or a certain part of the ecliptic. 

So what’s interesting to me about this concept is that the Hellenistic astrologers essentially stripped the concept of its notion to some extent of being like, a house or a place and instead they took the concept of signs of the zodiac being a house or place of the planet, and they instead applied that to the domicile scheme and to the Thema mundi and for the exaltations and applied the concept of, like, a home to the domiciles or what became known as the domiciles in the Hellenistic tradition, whereas the exaltations, they sort of reconceptualized as having to do with lifting something up to a height or pulling something down to a low point essentially, and this notion of height and eminence and prominence or prominent figures, as well as themes of increase when it came to the exaltations. And then the signs opposite to the exaltations became known as the signs of a planet’s depression or fall, representing lowering or cheapening or decreasing something. So the signs of a planet’s depression are Jupiter in Capricorn, Mars in Cancer, the Sun in Libra, Saturn in Aries, Venus in Virgo, Mercury in Pisces, and the Moon in Scorpio. And one of the things that I mentioned previously that was a big discovery to me, at least, over the past few years is essentially that in the Mesopotamian tradition, the signs of exaltation were functionally tropical to the extent that they were partially tied in with the seasons or seasonal considerations, whereas the specific degrees of exaltation which seem to have come about late in the Mesopotamian tradition were sidereal and tied in with certain fixed stars. So and this is tied in with the three paths in Mesopotamian astrology, and in their recent edition of the MUL.APIN, Hermann Hunger and John Steele pointed out that it lists the exaltations in the exact same section as the three paths of the stars, which suggests that those were the primary motivating factor for the scheme. And these three paths in Babylonian astronomy are basically dividing the sky into three bands of declination, belonging to the gods Enlil, which is the northern sky, Anu, which is the middle or equatorial sky, and Ea, which is the southern sky. And what’s crucial about this is that these three paths were inextricably linked to the seasons and to the solar turning points where Enlil was connected with the hot summer solstice, Anu was connected with the spring and autumn equinoxes, and Ea with the cold, winter solstice. So what this means is that by structurally linking the exaltations to these paths, the Babylonian astrologers had already basically embedded a quasi-tropical rationale or a sort of seasonal framework into the scheme centuries before the later Greek or Hellenistic astrologers really formalized the use of the tropical zodiac. And this was, like, long before procession existed, before Hipparchus discovered that in the second century BCE, so it was really also in some ways before there was an awareness that those two different frames of reference of tropical and sidereal were drifting, basically. But nonetheless, it ties the exaltations into this framework, because when you superimpose them on these three paths, what you end up is something like this, which is that Jupiter gets associated with the path of Enlil. And let me actually put up a different diagram. 

So here’s a better diagram that Paige Allison made for me, and I wanted to give a shout out to Paige, because Paige made a bunch of different diagrams for me that I’m gonna use in this section. So shout out to her. And this is my attempt to sort of translate some of this into a cleaner diagram, some of the images that I was showing previously. But functionally, the way this ends up working, as I understand it if I understand it correctly, and this is something I just really came across over the past year or two, but Jupiter is associated with Enlil, which is the northern path that functionally gets associated with the summer solstice, which then is sort of why Jupiter eventually gets associated with the sign of Cancer as its exaltation or its secret place. 

Opposite to that, Mars is associated with the path of Ea, which is the southern path which then is more associated with the winter solstice. Then all of the other visible or traditional planets are associated with the Anu path, which is like, the middle path, but it gets functionally associated with either the spring or the fall equinox. And if I understand it correctly, the three planets, the three brightest planets which are the Moon, the Sun, and Venus, get associated with the spring equinox when basically when the Sun is in Aries, basically, versus the other two planets, which are more dim or darker – Mercury and Saturn – get associated with the fall equinox. And functionally, when you do that, you basically end up with a very similar rationale to what the Hellenistic astrologers – like Ptolemy for example said when he talked about the exaltations and rationalized them partially in a seasonal or tropical framework where he said that, for example, the Sun is exalted in Aries because that’s the point of the spring equinox when the days are getting longer and the nights are getting shorter. So therefore the concept of light and warmth and heat that the Sun represents is on the increase and is rising up. And that’s opposite to – and that’s why the Sun has its exaltation in Aries, versus Saturn, which is like, the furthest and slowest and darkest planet of the traditional planets has its exaltation in Libra. And Libra is associated with the fall equinox when the nights are getting longer and the days are getting shorter. So there’s this notion of, like, night and darkness and cold and other things like that are on the increase. So those two planets are opposite to each other on the equinoxes as a result of that. Versus Jupiter, for example, is exalted in Cancer, which is associated with the summer solstice when the days are the longest and the nights are the shortest. So it gets exalted in that sign, especially as a benefic. And that’s opposite to Mars, the other malefic planet besides Saturn, which has its exaltation in Capricorn, which is the sign associated with the winter solstice when the days are the shortest and the nights are the longest, and there’s snow and cold and all of those other things in the northern hemisphere where this system was created in Mesopotamia and then eventually also in Egypt. 

So what’s interesting is one of the points that Ptolemy makes, then, is that the Moon has its exaltation in Taurus because that’s the sign where the Moon will make its heliacal rising from out under the beams of the Sun after the New Moon that takes place after the spring equinox. So as a result of that, the Moon is seen to be rising and increasing in brightness and in light, because it’s now at the very beginning of its waxing cycle. So again, there’s this notion of an increase in light and brightness and probably vitality and other things like that, whereas for example, Valens says that if the Moon had conjoined the Sun in Aries around the time of the spring equinox, then that means it reaches the Full Moon phase in Libra when it’s at its brightest, so therefore when it hits Scorpio, the sign opposite to the Moon’s exaltation, the Moon’s light begins to wane. And it moves into a phase where it’s decreasing in brightness or sort of like, falling down from the peak of its brightness in some sense. And he gives that as partially a rationale for why the Moon has its fall in Scorpio. 

So there’s just this really interesting then rationale which I guess I assumed could be, like, a later Hellenistic rationalization even though it made sense in Ptolemy and other Hellenistic authors. But it turns out that it may actually be closer to the original rationalization in some sense than I ever realized until basically, like, a year or two ago. 

All right, so those are the exaltations. I will mention briefly in passing that there was a paper that came out recently in the past I think couple of years by Mathieu Ossendrijver who published a paper titled “The Exaltations of Greco-Roman Astrology and Their Relationship to Babylonian Normal Star Positions,” and in this he showed that most of the exaltation degrees, which may have been a late innovation in the Mesopotamian tradition, but most of them are tied in with specific fixed stars. And specifically, the exaltation degrees seem to be mathematically anchored to the Moon and specifically the Moon having its exaltation degree in connection with the Pleiades. And then what’s interesting about that is that the Sun’s exaltation is not based on a fixed star, but instead it’s just based on – it’s derived from the Moon’s degree and the Sun is moved back a certain number of degrees in order to make it so that the Moon is making its heliacal rising relative to the Sun in Aries. 

So I think that’s really interesting and has some interesting implications in terms of, you know, I never used the exaltation degrees because I was always nervous there could be some sort of sidereal rationale for them like that, and that turns out to be the case. But I was surprised and interested to find that for the exaltation signs that there’s more of a tropical or seasonal rationale. 

And back to the exaltations, one of the things that’s interesting about them is there’s, like, this cultural stamp to them where because it’s anchored to Aries, it reflects the Babylonian new year and the lunar calendar of the Babylonians, especially in terms of like, the Moon making its first heliacal rising after the spring equinox. And one of the things that’s interesting is that in a lot of Babylonian texts, the Moon and the Sun and the planet Venus are often grouped together. And you have a bunch of – one of the things we talked about in the Mesopotamian astrology episode is there’s a bunch of these boundary stones that survive from the Mesopotamian period, and they often have this trinity of these three bright planets or bright celestial bodies, which are Venus in the top left, the Moon, and then the Sun. And this kind of like, recreates the grouping of those three planets in the exaltations. So I thought that was really cool because it means that that ancient – that grouping of the exaltations we see in this diagram with Venus in Pisces and the Sun in Aries and the Moon in Taurus really reflects a very ancient grouping and notion of associating those three bright celestial bodies, basically, with the spring equinox and the season where especially the Sun and the concept of light is on the increase day after day. 

Next, we move onto the Thema mundi, which is the mythical birth chart for the birth of the cosmos itself according to the ancient Hellenistic astrologers. So Firmicus Maternus, as I said, explicitly attributes the doctrine of the Thema mundi to Nechepso and Petosiris who reportedly received it from Asclepius and Hermes Trismegistus. And it’s basically this mythical birth chart which Firmicus himself has this digression and says it’s not really the birth chart of the cosmos, but instead he said it was like, a teaching tool that was used to teach the principles of Hellenistic astrology. And I don’t know if that’s just, like, Firmicus’s own digression because he is living in, like, the 4th century and he feels like explaining that, or if such a digression was there in the ancient Hermetic texts. I mean, it probably wasn’t; it was probably presented as this kind of like, mythological narrative in terms of something similar to, like, Corpus Hermeticum I, the Poimandres, which gives this mythological account of the creation of the cosmos and how it’s set up with the different planetary spheres and things like that. Or the Timaeus, which is presented as this mythological story about the creation of the cosmos as a divine, sentient being with a body and a soul. Or we also have later in Abu Ma’shar, the Hermetic text that he had access to, which I think is a later text probably from the 3rd century or later, where it also presents things in this very interesting philosophical but also cosmological and mythological way. So I suspect that that’s how the Thema mundi was originally presented as well. 

So let’s take a look at the Thema mundi. All right, so this is the Thema mundi, and our earliest sources for it, which I believe are Antiochus, says that the Thema mundi, that the birth of the cosmos or the birth chart of the cosmos has Cancer rising. So Cancer is the rising sign, and the first whole sign house. And then the Moon is in Cancer in the first house. The Sun is in Leo. And then the rest of the planets are assigned to each of the signs of the zodiac flanking out in zodiacal order. So going in the order in which the planets move through the signs of the zodiac, based on their relative speed and distance from the Sun. So Mercury, which never gets more than one sign away from the Sun before it slows down and stations direct gets assigned to Virgo. And Venus, which never gets more than two signs away from the Sun before it slows down and stations direct is assigned to Libra. Then the next furthest and slowest planet out is Mars, which is assigned to Scorpio. Then Jupiter, which is assigned to Sagittarius. And then finally Saturn, which is the furthest and the slowest and the dimmest visible planet, gets assigned to Capricorn, which in the tropical zodiac Capricorn is associated with the winter solstice which is the coldest part of the year in the northern hemisphere and also the time when the nights are the longest and the days are the shortest. And that’s opposite to the Moon in Cancer, which is the sign of the summer solstice when the days are the longest when the Sun is there and the nights are the shortest. And the Sun, which is in Leo, right in the middle of the summer basically. Because when the Sun is in Leo, especially when it’s at 15 degrees right in the middle of the sign, that’s literally the middle or the height of summer. 

So this is basically, like, the most important foundational construct that gets introduced by the early Hellenistic astrologers, possibly as early as that Hermes text that introduced the dodecatropos. And there’s a bunch of different concepts that are derived from this text, and one of the main things that it does though is it establishes the so-called domiciles of the planets or the homes of the planets, which become the signs of the zodiac that each of the planets are said to rule. And part of the reason for this, which is kind of interesting and ties back into the earlier Mesopotamian tradition, is remember in the Enuma Elish it talks about, like, the god Marduk establishing the stations of the planets. And one of the things that’s interesting here is the concept of planetary stations in the sense of retrograde stations, retrograde and direct stations, is kind of embedded in the Thema mundi. Because as I said, once you assign the Sun to especially the middle of Leo right during the height and the middle of the summer, Mercury gets assigned to Virgo because Mercury will – when it gets to Virgo, it’ll slow down and station retrograde and come to a stop in the sign of Virgo. And one of the very brilliant insights that Robert Schmidt had at one point was that this notion of slowing down and coming to a stop or coming to a resting place was probably part of the conceptual premise here underlying why the Hellenistic astrologers or the founders of Hellenistic astrology decided to call these signs the homes or the domiciles of the planets, because these are the stations or the places essentially where in an ideal scenario the planets would come to a rest. So that’s Mercury stationing in Virgo, that’s Venus stationing in Libra, Jupiter actually always makes its station when it’s trine to the Sun, so that works out there as well. Mars also starts making – its retrogrades are kind of weird, but it also starts making a special movement towards stationing at the squares. And then Saturn is just the furthest and slowest visible planet, which gets assigned to the last sign, which is Capricorn. So there may be something conceptually, though, where they’re taking this notion of a planet in this idealized birth chart for the beginning of the cosmos for a planet slowing down and stationing, and that notion of coming to rest astronomically, and then sort of like, interpreting that symbolically in order to establish that certain planets are associated with certain signs of the zodiac in addition to some of the other concepts that we’ve talked about, like the Sun being in Leo at the height of the summer and the Moon being assigned to the other sign, which is Cancer right after the summer solstice. So basically the two luminaries or the two lights are assigned to the two signs that coincide with the hottest and brightest part of the year with Cancer and Leo. And then this is opposite to Saturn. 

So this initial starting point for the Thema mundi then becomes the rationale when you create a mirror image of the Thema mundi basically that goes across the axis between the Sun and Moon and between Cancer and Leo, and you basically create a mirror image of the Thema mundi where all of the planets get assigned to a solar half of the zodiac starting from the Sun in Leo, and then moving forward to Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Libra, Mars in Scorpio, Jupiter in Sagittarius, and Saturn in Capricorn just like they are in the Thema mundi. But then there’s a mirror image of that where the same planets are assigned flanking out in the opposite zodiacal order from the Moon. So the Moon in Cancer, Mercury in Gemini, Venus in Taurus, Mars in Aries, Jupiter in Pisces, Saturn in Aquarius. So this creates what became the standard set of rulerships between each of the signs of the zodiac and each of the planets in ancient astrology from the second century BCE forward essentially. 

And then one of the things that’s weird about this is that the Thema mundi sets up the domicile scheme, but then one of the things that Ptolemy points out is that the domicile scheme in the Thema mundi then by extension set up and describe the nature of the aspects or the configurations between the planets and the general associations of what those aspects are supposed to mean. So with this, basically if you draw aspect lines from each of the two luminaries to the relevant benefics and malefics in each of their hemispheres in the solar and lunar hemispheres on the right and left side, what you get is that the sextile, which is two signs away from both of the luminaries, goes to Venus. So from the Sun in Leo, you draw a line two signs away, and it brings you to Venus, and that’s the sextile which is two signs away or 60 degrees. And then it’s the same with the Moon in Cancer, which is configured by sextile to Venus in Taurus. So by extension, the sextile becomes associated with Venus. The square becomes associated with Mars. The trine becomes associated with Jupiter. And the opposition becomes associated with Saturn. And what’s fascinating about that is it kind of breaks down in terms of – it kind of works in terms of the square and the sextile are usually treated as weaker aspects, and those two aspects are associated with what later, at least by the medieval tradition, became known as the lesser benefic, Venus, and the lesser malefic, Mars. Whereas the trine and the opposition are associated with the greater benefic, Jupiter, and the greater malefic, Saturn. And the trine is thought to be the more powerful of the two positive aspects between the sextile and the trine, and the opposition is thought to be the more difficult of the two hard aspects compared to the square, which is thought to be a little bit easier of an aspect compared to the opposition, and Saturn is the greater malefic. 

So, you know, that’s one of the things that’s weird right away is that we start having these overlapping doctrines where first we had the idea of, like, the planets, and then we had the idea of assigning them to signs of the zodiac. Now we see this crossover where we’re starting to see the foundations of the doctrine of aspects or configurations between planets, as well as the nature of the configurations, as well as distinctions between benefic and malefic planets, which are – the benefics are Venus and Jupiter, and the malefics are Mars and Saturn. And this is some of the early instances of this really weird and brilliant technical – this overlapping and interlocking technical integration between the different diagrams and concepts that were introduced during this foundational phase of Hellenistic astrology. 

One other point that I’ll mention here that is worth noting is that one of the things that we see here is the sextile is associated with Venus, with the nocturnal planet Venus, and the trine is associated with the diurnal planet Jupiter, which brings in the concept of sect which is the distinction between daytime planets and nighttime planets, which I’ll get into more in a second. But remember that association, of the sextile with the nocturnal planet Venus, and the trine with the diurnal planet Jupiter, because we’ll come back to that and we’ll see that again a couple times here very shortly. 

Actually, we’ll see it right now, because one of the things that Antiochus and Porphyry point out is this weird interconnection between the domiciles and the exaltation scheme where Porphyry points out in his introduction that each of the diurnal or daytime planets, which is the Sun and Jupiter and Saturn, when they are in their signs of exaltation, they’re configured to one of their domiciles by a trine aspect. So for example, the Sun in the sign of its exaltation in Aries is configured by trine to its domicile which is Leo. And Jupiter, which has its exaltation in Cancer, is configured by trine to its domicile in Pisces. And Saturn, which has its exaltation in Libra, is configured to Aquarius by a trine as well. So that’s kind of weird. Maybe that’s a coincidence. Maybe not. But then Porphyry goes on, and he says, by contrast, each of the nocturnal planets, which is the Moon, Venus, and Mars, are when they’re in their sign of exaltation, are configured to their domicile or to one of their domiciles by a sextile. So for example, the Moon which is exalted in Taurus is configured by sextile to its domicile of Cancer. So Cancer is a sextile to Taurus, so that works out. Venus, which is exalted in Pisces, is configured to its domicile of Taurus by sextile. And Mars, when it’s in its exaltation of Capricorn, is configured to its domicile of Scorpio by sextile. So that’s kind of weird, because that does look like a pattern, and that’s a pattern that I pointed out drawing on Porphyry in my book in 2017 because it starts to be really weird because then it’s interconnecting the concepts of domicile and exaltation through these weird, geometrical connections and patterns through the aspects, and it’s creating an interlocking relationship basically between at least, like, four concepts of domicile, exaltation, aspect, as well as the doctrine of sect, which is the distinction between day and night planets. 

So that was one of the reasons why in my book I’m like, a little skeptical that the concept of exaltation – like, thinking maybe it wasn’t inherited from the Mesopotamian tradition, because it’s like, interlocking in these really weird ways with some of the diagrams in the Hellenistic tradition such as in this instance the concept of domiciles and aspects and sect. But it’s like, that’s one of the things that’s been blowing my mind the past several years is lo and behold, the exaltations really did come from the Mesopotamian tradition and clearly date back to at least 1000 BCE. So they really did inherit that concept, but then start somehow, like, interlinking it in these really weird and interesting and bizarre ways when they were constructing some of these other diagrams that were foundational concepts in Hellenistic astrology. 

Okay, so there’s more with the Thema mundi and the exaltations, though. So remember in the Thema mundi, it has Cancer rising, so the Ascendant or the rising sign and the first house is the zodiacal sign of Cancer. And one of the interesting things is if you take the exaltations and superimpose them on the Thema mundi with Cancer rising, you end up with this diagram, and one of the weird things that Robert Schmidt pointed out, I think drawing inspiration from this late Greek text that was translating some material from Persian about some alternative legend surrounding the Thema mundi, is Schmidt pointed out that when you superimpose the exaltations on the Thema mundi that all of the planets are aspecting the rising sign through one of the major recognized aspects in Hellenistic astrology. So for example, Jupiter is in the first house, so it’s in the first house of the Thema mundi. But then the Moon in Taurus is configured to the Ascendant through a sextile, which is one of the major recognized aspects in Hellenistic astrology. The Sun in Aries is configured to Cancer and to the rising sign by a square. Venus in Pisces is configured to the rising sign by a trine. Mars in Capricorn is configured to the rising sign by an opposition. Saturn in Libra is configured to the rising sign by a square. Mercury in Virgo is configured to the rising sign by a sextile. So those are all of the major aspects that are used in Hellenistic astrology, including Jupiter, which is in the sign which is a conjunction or copresence. So you get this accounting of all of the major aspects that are used in Hellenistic astrology and then interestingly, that also overlaps with a doctrine that relates to the houses, which is the doctrine of good and bad places, which is basically that we can already see traces of this doctrine in the Hermes text. And Firmicus talks about it really explicitly, probably drawing on Asclepius. But basically, since the first house was thought to signify the life and the body and the physical vitality of the native, any of the 12 houses that aspect through a whole sign house aspect the rising sign were thought to be good houses and were called the good houses or good places, and they were thought to signify positive things that are somehow supportive of the life or positive in some way. So for example, if the first house is Cancer, then the 3rd house, which is configured by sextile, is associated with siblings. The 4th house, which is square, is associated with parents. The 5th house which is trine is associated with children. The 7th house which is opposite that is associated with the spouse. The 9th house is associated with travel. The 10th, career. And the 11th, friends. But the other houses, like the 6th house, which does not aspect the rising sign, is associated with illness. The 8th house, which is not aspecting, is associated with death. And the 12th house becomes associated with enemies. The 2nd house is one of the only other bad houses that starts to get some positive significations of like, money and finances and things like that, but that’s partially because it’s also rising up towards the rising sign. 

So what’s weird, basically, then is if you look at the Thema mundi knowing that later technical context of good and bad houses, you realize that when you superimpose the exaltations on the Thema mundi, all of the planets in their exaltation are in one of the good houses. So again, that’s like, this weird suggestive thing where we’re starting to see overlaps with all of these different concepts that seem to be interconnected in this really interesting and mysterious way. 

And speaking of that, one little suggestive thing I’d like to mention here that I mentioned in the Mesopotamian astrology episode is remember from, like, 1100 BCE when you had that creation epic from Mesopotamia, the Enuma Elish, it has this story about how one of the great gods, Marduk, cuts the goddess Tiamat in half, and it ends up dividing the earth basically and the sky. And that becomes part of the creation story. And one of the things that I think is really weird that I have a hard time believing that later astrologers – like, especially Berosus, who mentions this story in passing, wouldn’t have thought about or had in mind in some way – is that when you superimpose the exaltation of Jupiter on the Thema mundi, of course, it’s in the first house. And what’s weird about that is the god Marduk in Mesopotamia, that became the god that eventually became associated with the planet Jupiter. So as a result of that, that myth in some later conceptualizations would have been associated with Jupiter. And one of the things that’s weird when you superimpose Jupiter on the Thema mundi and put it in the first house is that the first house is the meeting point between the sky and the earth. And that’s part of what is significant and important about the first house, especially in Hellenistic astrology where with whole sign houses, part of the first house is above the horizon or above the degree of the Ascendant, and part of the first house is below the horizon or below the degree of the Ascendant, because the Ascendant itself, the Ascendant degree is literally the point where the sky and the planets emerge from under the earth and rise up over the eastern horizon into visibility and into the sky. 

So there’s something here that I’m still trying to work out exactly what the implication of that is, but I kind of suspect that some of the late Mesopotamian astrologers might have had this in mind in some way, and this could have acted as some kind of precursor to the doctrine of the Thema mundi in some way. And I don’t know what that means, because I don’t know – it’s like, there’s been, you know, we have to remain open to the possibility that the domicile scheme could have originated in late Mesopotamian astrology. But as of today, I don’t think there’s really good evidence for that. The closest – there was a scholar who wrote a book that tried to argue that recently, but the evidence for that seemed really not extensive and really lacking. Like, it didn’t seem very compelling. The closest thing I have seen is that I have seen references that there was a lunar festival or that the Moon is Mesopotamia may have been associated with the month – the Moon god may have been associated with the month that preceded and leaded all the way up to essentially the summer solstice, so that there may have been some prior tradition which almost associated the Moon with the summer solstice, which functionally in the tropical zodiac is the beginning of Cancer. But I think the Hellenistic astrologers still would have had to have taken that in a different direction, because most of that month would have fallen in Gemini in the Mesopotamian tradition. But Cancer and the summer solstice in the Hellenistic tradition was following after the summer solstice, basically. So there’s still some things that are worth exploring there, but there’s something about this, especially because Berosus mentions, I believe, this myth. I think he mentions Tiamat and some of the myths surrounding the Enuma Elish or alludes to it. And he also has that passage I read much earlier about the destruction of the cosmos occurring when all of the planets line up in Cancer and Capricorn. So it’s like, one of the questions is then did the late Mesopotamians have some sort of preexisting belief about not just the creation of the world, but also the – not just the destruction of the world, but also the creation of the world somehow in connection with Cancer and Capricorn as well? And if they did, then that may have acted as some kind of precursor for the Thema mundi. But a lot of that remains speculative, despite being annoyingly tantalizing. 

And in point of fact, the exaltations, because they’re tied in with the Babylonian new year, the way that the Thema mundi is set up does seem to put more of an Egyptian stamp on it because the Sun is in Leo and because Cancer is rising. And that’s functionally tied in, then, with the Egyptian new year when the Sun is essentially in Leo and the Nile floods around that point during the middle of the summer. And also you have the heliacal rising of the fixed star Sirius, which would emerge over the eastern horizon prior to sunrise. And that’s part of what designates basically the Egyptian new year. So it’s like, even though there is tantalizing stuff that could have indicated a Babylonian precursor to the Thema mundi, really the Thema mundi seems to have this very strong Egyptian stamp because it’s almost like somebody took the exaltations, which are focused on the spring equinox with the Sun in Aries, and they subordinated that and instead put the focus on the Egyptian new year and said, “No, this is the most important thing is when the Sun is in Leo and Cancer is rising,” which marks the Egyptian new year. And in that way, it kind of reminds me of something that I noted in my book, which is that there was this competition between the late Babylonian astrologers and the Egyptian astrologers about whose astrological and astronomical traditions were older. And each of those traditions seem to have sometimes given, like, really far-flung numbers about their tradition going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and it seems like there was a competition where they were almost trying to outdo each other and where they were trying to claim that their tradition was the oldest. And what’s funny about this is you even see this coming up I think in the first century Egyptian priest Chaeremon. He actually mentions the Babylonian sage Adapa, but he does this weird thing where he tries to put a negative spin on the Adapa story almost to undermine or insult the divine sage that the Mesopotamian astrologers associated with the revelation of their astrological doctrines, and instead to, like, emphasize or make as more preeminent the sage that the Egyptian priests and astrologers looked up to, which was Hermes Trismegistus. And there’s some really interesting stuff there, and that’s – like, one of the things all of this I’d like to explore because I’m working on – I’d like to turn this all into a follow-up book on the philosophy of Hellenistic astrology by situating Hellenistic astrology within the context of other ancient philosophies of its day, kind of like I did in this lecture but more extensively. And one of the sections that would be really interesting as part of that or, you know, even part of a PhD dissertation if I was a younger and more ambitious man at this point would be exploring things like that in terms of the competition between the ancient astrologers and how even in terms of the framing of their divine revelations and revelatory sages, you can sort of infer some of the turf wars that were going on between the different traditions. 

One of the correlations I only noticed recently when I was rereading Firmicus Maternus and trying to see if there was, like, any additional clues about other interconnections between the different diagrams, and towards the end of Firmicus’s treatment of the Thema mundi, which he’s drawing on Asclepius and Nechepso and Petosiris, he has this stray reference towards the end of it that I never fully took into account before where he notes that basically in the Thema mundi, almost every planet aspects the sign of Aries which is the Midheaven in the Thema mundi and is the first sign of the zodiac. So it really works out. So here’s the Thema mundi with Cancer rising as the first house, and then the Moon in Cancer, the Sun in Leo, so on and so forth. Most of the planets aspect Aries in the Thema mundi. So the Moon is configured to Aries by a square, the Sun is configured by a trine, Saturn is configured by a square, Jupiter is configured by a trine, and Venus is configured by an opposition. What’s interesting is the only two planets and the only two signs that are not configured are Mercury in Virgo and Mars in Scorpio. But one of the things that I find fascinating about that is that those two signs happen to be two of the signs that have what’s called – even though they’re in aversion – they’re in a mitigated aversion because of two alternative ways of mitigating signs that do not have normal aspects in Hellenistic astrology. And one of those is through antiscia, where the sign – Virgo – has antiscia with the sign of Aries, and then the other mitigating factor for aversions that’s mentioned by Hellenistic authors like Paulus Alexandrinus is the concept of like-engirding signs, or co-zonal or co-ruling signs where, for example, Scorpio is ruled by Mars, which is the same planet that rules Aries. And as a result of that, there’s more of a mitigation in the aversion or the lack of aspect between those two planets or those two signs. 

So I don’t know, you know, how much the mitigated thing is deliberate. It’s actually really striking how those do happen to be two mitigated signs. But the fact that Firmicus mentions that, and then one of the things that he says is that he’s only introducing this and mentioning this now because he’s introduced the signs of the zodiac and now he’s introduced the Thema mundi. So then he’s sort of like, excited that he can point out this part. And I think this is important, because he’s probably drawing this – this is probably some kind of doctrine or reference that he’s getting from his source text of Asclepius or Nechepso and Petosiris. And it may imply that the other – one of the other, like, hidden things that was important about the Thema mundi was not just that it reoriented everything towards the Egyptian calendar and the Egyptian new year by having the Sun in Leo and Cancer rising mirroring the flooding of the Nile and the heliacal rising of Sirius. But with most of the planets aspecting Aries, the first zodiacal sign, it kind of refers back to the Babylonian new year or takes that into account as well as the doctrine of exaltations to some extent. So that’s not, like, a major crazy compelling or interesting one, but it’s a new one that I only noticed recently that actually has a textual basis and therefore may be more important versus sometimes with other ones we can notice some of these things and wonder how deliberate that was, and in some instances, it looks really deliberate, but without a textual reference we can’t necessarily know for sure unless it’s super compelling how much that was actually something that was intended by the founders or the creators of the diagram. But with something like this, because it does have a textual source, that may actually be an important factor here or was an important factor in the creation of some of these diagrams and the ways that they’re interconnected. 

All right, so moving onto some philosophical and religious concepts that are kind of embedded here. The early astrologer who may be first century BCE or first century CE named Antiochus of Athens uniquely refers to the Thema mundi as the nativity of god. And I think this is important, because it reflects some Stoic or Hermetic philosophical views that viewed the cosmos itself as a divine sentient living being. And I think this was tied in with some Hermetic concepts of, like, the macrocosm and the microcosm and the notion that an individual’s life and our body and some of the things about it is somehow mirrored by the larger cosmos itself. And we’ll come back to that concept, because in Hermeticism, there ended up being this really common stratification of these three tiers which is like, at the top tier is god or the concept or existence of god. In the second tier was the cosmos, which is also a second god or a craftsman god. And then finally the third tier is the individual human or individual human life or humanity in general. And I think that’s part of potentially what’s being hinted at here when we hear Antiochus referring to the Thema mundi as the nativity of god. I think it’s talking about probably the second god, the craftsman god or the cosmos, which is the visible god. 

All right, and the last point is that Porphyry in one of his philosophical texts, On the Cave of the Nymphs, in chapter 22, he highlights the Cancer-Capricorn axis as what he calls the gate of men, which he says is the portal where souls fall into physical incarnation. So I have a quote here. He says, 

“The theologians therefore established the two gates, Cancer and Capricorn; but Plato called them two mouths. Of these, they say that Cancer is the gate through which souls descend, but Capricorn that through which they ascend. Cancer is indeed northern, and adapted to descent; but Capricorn is southern, and adapted to ascent. The northern parts, likewise, pertain to souls descending into generation.” 

So I think this is important, because again there’s some – you know, unfortunately, which a lot of the Hellenistic astrological texts, what we have that survives is largely technical astrological manuals that don’t explain a lot about the philosophy or religious concepts underlying them. But sometimes we see these hints and these references in passing in some of the astrological texts like Antiochus saying the Thema mundi is the nativity of god in passing, or Porphyry here talking about the souls descending through Cancer basically into incarnation or ascending through Capricorn. And some of this is just suggestive of especially the Thema mundi and especially because the Thema mundi itself has Cancer rising, and so we have this notion of the Moon being associated with the first house, and that being the rising sign at the moment of birth, and that being opposite to Saturn in Capricorn which is associated with the 7th house and which at least in the Hermes text the 7th house is associated with death. So the 7th house is associated with death, and the first house is associated with life. So there’s something there then that may be referring back to the Thema mundi when Porphyry refers to this notion of the ascent and descent of the souls and connects it with Cancer and Capricorn. 

All right, the next conceptual construct I’d like to talk about is what I call the seven-zoned sphere, or that’s what it was referred to in texts like Paulus of Alexandria in the 4th century. And this concept on the one hand is connected to a specific planetary order called the Chaldean order or that’s referred to – it’s been referred to for a long time as the Chaldean order. But and as a result of it being called the Chaldean order, it was often assumed to go back to the ancient Mesopotamian astrologers that are sometimes known as Chaldeans. However, the one source that calls this Chaldean is the 5th century CE writer Macrobius. And in Macrobius’s time, Chaldean was largely just a generic term for astrologer at that point. So when Macrobius refers to this as the system of the Chaldeans, he’s actually referring to it probably as the system of the astrologers. And as I pointed out in a recent episode on the origin of the Chaldean order and the planetary days of the week where I did a whole treatment of this that I’ll just briefly summarize here, the first reference to this system is that Thrasyllus says explicitly in the early first century sometime before 36 CE that Nechepso and Petosiris dealt with the topic of the seven-zoned sphere. 

So what the seven-zoned sphere was is this. Let me show a diagram. All right, so the seven-zoned sphere is this. It’s a diagram of the spherical nature of the cosmos according to the Greeks, but it’s also a specific planetary order where the planets are ordered based on their speeds, especially based on their zodiacal speeds of how frequently they will come back to a specific sign and degree of the zodiac. And the fastest planet which they then associate with the closest planet to us is the Moon. And then next after that is Mercury. Then Venus. Then the Sun right in the center. Then Mars. Then Jupiter. And then Saturn. And then finally on the outermost periphery is the sphere of the fixed stars, which is also the sphere that’s associated with the zodiac. 

So this is really important, because like I sorted out and like I’ve talked about, one of my things is that I think I can show that I believe the earliest source that really talks about this is the Nechepso text in the middle of the second century BCE that is cited by Thrasyllus. And therefore I think there’s actually good reason to think that that circle of astrologers that’s living and working in Alexandria in the second century BCE and the circle of Hermetic texts surrounding Nechepso and Petosiris and Asclepius and Hermes may have been the group that introduced this cosmological diagram where the Sun was moved from the place that it had been in the second place after the Moon since the time of Plato circa, I don’t know, let’s say like 350 BCE until basically in the second century BCE somebody moved the Sun to the center of the cosmos. And I strongly suspect that it was this group of Hermetic authors. But then probably because the texts, especially of Nechepso and Petosiris, were written under this premise of being ancient Egyptian texts from the remote past that were literally written by an Egyptian king named Nechepso and a ancient sage or priest named Petosiris, like, people took them really seriously and may have taken this cosmological model and diagram seriously as well. So that either the Nechepso and Petosiris texts and those surrounded them introduced it, or if they were not the ones that introduced it, their adoption and promotion of it and the central place that it played in both Hellenistic astrology as well as the Hermetic philosophy was that connected with these texts made it so that they popularized this conceptualization of the cosmos and this planetary order. And that’s basically the argument I make in that recent episode. 

So what’s important about this, and one of the big breakthroughs for me over the past – I think I’ve been working on the seven-zoned sphere for, like, two or three years – is realizing that this basically takes the form of – just like the Thema mundi as a conceptual construct the Hellenistic astrologers, whether they invented it or whether they just popularized it, really grabbed a hold of this model of the cosmos and then used it just like the Thema mundi as a conceptual construct in order to derive a bunch of different technical concepts as well as philosophical concepts. And of course, one of the most striking technical or philosophical concepts that derives from this planetary order and this model of the cosmos is the notion of the ascent and descent of the soul through the planetary spheres, where right away in Corpus Hermeticum I in that philosophical text, there’s this notion of the souls originating somewhere beyond the sphere of the fixed stars and perhaps beyond time and space. But then for whatever reason, the soul descends towards earth, and then it passes through each of the planetary spheres in order, first going through Saturn and then going through Jupiter, then Mars, then the Sun, then Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. And in the Corpus Hermeticum in the Poimandres, it’s said to, like, pick up qualities from each of the planets and to put them on kind of like clothes. And then eventually you descend into birth and you’re born somehow with some of these qualities associated with the planets embedded in you as part of your life or personality or actions or fate or something. And then eventually at the end of your life, once you die, you ascend back up through the planetary spheres and you give back each of these specific qualities that are associated with each of the planets. First to the Moon, then Mercury, then Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and eventually back to the fixed stars. 

So one of the things that I think is important about that is that I think it adds a concept of dimensionality to the Hellenistic astrological construct. And I think that would have been one of the motivating roles for it conceptually, because the Thema mundi itself and the domicile scheme primarily has this rightwards and leftwards motion. And the doctrine of right and left – there is an actual doctrine of right and left in Hellenistic astrology, and it has to do with the signs of the zodiac and which ones are earlier and which ones are later. And I think part of that conceptualization actually may have been tied in with that the doctrine of aspects was tied in with optical theories of sight and of, like, seeing that were common or that were prominent in the Hellenistic era. And this notion sometimes that vision occurred through the eyes or through one of the eyes emitting a ray and another eye or both of the eyes receiving rays from objects that you’re looking at, and that that’s how vision takes place. But the reason why I’m mentioning this is because one of the things in Hellenistic astrology is that in texts like Valens and in pretty much all the Hellenistic astrologers, the luminaries are associated with the eyes and with the ability or the sense of sight. And what I find interesting about that is there may have been some notion tied in with how the domicile scheme in Hellenistic astrology sets up the doctrine of aspects, and it sets up the two hemispheres that are divided between the Sun and Moon in Cancer and Leo, and I think there might have been some notion of the Sun emitting rays or emitting sight forward in zodiacal order to Libra by the sextile, to Scorpio, to Sagittarius, and then eventually to Aquarius. But then the Moon is receiving rays, and it’s receiving sight from Saturn in Capricorn through the opposition, through Jupiter in Pisces and the trine, through Mars in Aries and the square, and through Venus in Taurus through the sextile. So this might have been partially how they were coming up with there’s this whole complicated doctrine of planets overcoming versus planets hurling rays in Hellenistic astrology that’s described by Antiochus and Porphyry and Rhetorius. And I think it’s somehow embedded in some sort of implicit optical theories about like, the Sun emitting rays in the idealized Thema mundi or in the idealized framework of the domiciles, versus the Moon receiving rays through the inferior aspects. So inferior versus superior aspects, essentially. 

Okay, but going back to the seven-zoned sphere. So if left and right is established in the Thema mundi and the zodiac, what this establishes in the seven-zoned sphere is not left and right, but instead up or down. And that’s why you get these notions of the descent of the soul through the planetary spheres as well as the ascent of the soul through the planetary spheres. So it creates this sense of dimensionality, of creating a system that covers all of the different dimensions, not only of time, but also of space as well. 

And one other thing I want to mention here is I think this is another area with the seven-zoned sphere and the ascent and descent of the soul where there was some sort of preexisting concept that was inherited from the earlier traditions and then reconceptualized. Because one of the things that I talked about in a couple past episodes – so one of them on Inanna and Venus retrogrades I did with Demetra George a few years ago, and then another I think I talked about this possibly in the Mesopotamian episode with Willis Monroe. I may have mentioned it in the Hermeticism and Gnosticism episode as well. But in the Mesopotamian tradition, going back very far to at least 1000 BCE if not earlier, there was this myth of Inanna and her descent into the underworld. And this myth was supposed to – one of the things that it did is it partially described the astronomical process of Venus slowing down and going retrograde and then falling under the beams of the Sun and descending into the underworld before eventually reemerging on the other side and stationing direct. But one of the things that is really interesting and fascinating about that early Mesopotamian myth is that in the myth of Inanna, as Inanna is traveling to the underworld she has to pass through seven subterranean gates. And at each of the gates, she has to shed or take off different garments or different royal regalia that represent different powers that she has as a goddess until eventually she has to, like, enter the underworld completely naked and vulnerable to her sister who’s reigning as the goddess of the underworld there. 

So I think that’s really, really interesting, because again, it sets up some sort of precursor concept where in the Mesopotamian tradition you have some sort of notion of the underworld having seven gates and also the notion of, like, removing clothes that you had in life or removing garments at each of those gates. And then mysteriously, later on in the Hermetic tradition in the very first book of the Corpus Hermeticum, we suddenly have this doctrine that when you die that you have to go through the planetary spheres and give back qualities to each of the seven planets and to each of the seven planetary gods through these, like, gates basically that you encounter after death. And what’s interesting is in some of the Gnostic traditions, you even – like, the planets are explicitly conceptualized as archons or gatekeepers, and that the Gnostics would sometimes teach you special passwords so that you could get through certain planetary gates in order to ascend back to, like, to home basically or back to the source or back to god or what have you. 

So again, I wanted to mention this, because it sets up something where there’s a core concept in Hellenistic astrology that really may have some sort of preceding concept. So even though in some ways, it’s kind of new and innovative with the seven-zoned sphere, it’s also drawing some sort of continuity it seems like from the earlier tradition. 

All right. And the last couple of things I’ll mention about the seven-zoned sphere as a technical construct and part of the reason why I frame it that way is the Hellenistic astrologers may have derived a couple of additional actual technical things from it. So one of those is that the sort of geographic division between the planets in the seven-zoned sphere and their ordering may have helped to motivate the rationale behind sect where Porphyry and Antiochus seem to say that the reason why Venus and Mars are nocturnal planets that are associated with the Moon is because they set under the beams of the Sun frequently. And we can see that in the seven-zoned sphere diagram, Venus and Mars are in the two spheres adjacent to the Sun. So they frequently go under the beams of the Sun and go into hiding or go into obscurity where they can’t be seen, which is therefore associated with a concept of darkness or night or obscurity in some way. And that’s opposed to Jupiter and Saturn, which Porphyry and Antiochus point out do not set very frequently under the beams of the Sun or do not set as frequently, and so therefore they get associated with the stability of that which is visible and of the daytime and diurnal planets, as opposed to the more fluctuating, passional realm of matter that’s associated with the nocturnal planets. So that’s one thing. 

The last thing is if you read some of the early Hellenistic astrologers and pretty much throughout the Hellenistic tradition, a lot of the early authors like Antiochus, Porphyry, but also even Ptolemy derive or justify some of the core significations of the planets directly from their relative positions in the seven-zoned sphere. So for example, Ptolemy describes this where he says that – what does he say? He says the Sun is in the center of the order of the planets, and because Mars is in the sphere right next to it, Mars gets sort of heated up by the heat of the Sun. Versus Saturn, since it’s the furthest and slowest planet on the outer rims of the seven-zoned sphere, that Saturn is associated with coldness. But then Jupiter, because Jupiter is in the middle between the hotness of Mars and the cold of Saturn, that Jupiter is sort of like, warmed up and becomes temperate. And then Ptolemy says that this is why Jupiter is a benefic planet, because his basic definition of benefic and malefic is that Mars and Saturn are malefics or destructive because they tend towards extremes of hot and cold, whereas the benefics are benefic because they tend towards moderation. And because Jupiter is in between the heat and the cold and made to be moderate, therefore it’s thought to be benefic and productive of positive things. 

So I could see this rationale in Ptolemy, but I wasn’t sure in my book, like, I sort of have a few pages exploring to what extent Ptolemy’s taking this naturalistic rationale and then taking it further than others did. And to a certain extent, I think he did that, but I think he was actually, like, now I think he was just picking up on genuine things that were in the astrological tradition that were talked about probably going back to Nechepso and Petosiris. Because we can see earlier authors talk about similar things. Like Pliny the Elder gives a similar explanation when it comes to some of the planets and the relationship between, like, Mars and Jupiter and Saturn in the first century CE, which is the century before Ptolemy. And Pliny the Elder was explicitly drawing on Nechepso and Petosiris at certain points. 

So one of my points is that the Hellenistic astrologers, some of the earlier ones, may have been using this as a conceptual model to derive significations or to justify preexisting significations that already existed. And in the seven-zoned sphere model, I go through a longer summary to show how Porphyry and Antiochus actually do this with a bunch of the planets in different ways, where for example – I’ll just mention some of them briefly – where for example, the Moon is at the lowest sphere, and so it acts as like a funnel to the earth. And thus its proximity to the earth then symbolically is said to signify the physical body, which is close to us, as well as the general health and the maternal figure who helps to bring us into physical birth basically, into physical life and to generate us in the same way that the Moon acts as sort of like, the final gateway of the soul into physical incarnation. Or the Sun which occupies the central sphere in the seven-zoned sphere acts just like the heart of the cosmos, or the mind, as well as the organizing principle of the cosmos. Saturn, which is the furthest and slowest and coldest visible planet, that then translates into concrete astrological significations having to do with themes of, like, boundaries, finality, as well as chronic conditions that take a long time to resolve. And so on and so forth. So I’ll save the rest of that for that longer lecture that I just did on the seven-zoned sphere. But I hope that that gives some insight into something that I’ve been really excited about lately, which is just recognizing that the seven-zoned sphere was more important as a conceptual construct than I realized, and therefore it really rises to the level, essentially, of a Thema mundi-type conceptual construct that’s underlying Hellenistic astrology. 

All right. We’ve now reached the final technical construct that I have to introduce, which is the planetary joys scheme. And this is the big one, because this is the one where everything comes together in this unique and really kind of wild way. So let’s go ahead and jump right into it. 

And I should say that some of what I’m gonna introduce here was discovered in a series of discoveries that I made with my friend Ben Dykes around April and May of 2012. And I first presented at the United Astrology Conference that year in May – I turned around and presented some of it – where we found all of these really interesting connections underlying the planetary joys scheme. And then later that year, I published a paper on it in – what was it – like, the NCGR or the ISAR journal, which is up on my academia.edu page for Chris Brennan. And then some of that made its way into my book eventually in 2016. So I want to, because I’ve never really fully gone into it on the podcast for some reason, I have in my private Hellenistic astrology course for students – I did a full lecture on it back in 2012 that’s been there for years. But for some reason, I’ve never done a full treatment on the podcast. And additionally, there’s been new things that have been discovered over the course of the past few years that really took my breath away when it was first discovered, and I’ve still been processing the implications of that, especially this summer as I’ve been piecing everything together. So let’s get into it. 

All right, so here’s the planetary joys scheme, which is mentioned by almost every major Hellenistic astrologer, either explicitly or implicitly. Almost everybody mentions this scheme. It was very, very widely known and widely used. And it was an association between each of the seven traditional planets with one of the houses, with one of the 12 houses. And what I realized, what Ben and I realized in 2012 was that it actually represents its own schematic diagram or technical construct just like the Thema mundi that a bunch of different concepts are either derived from or tied into in really important ways. 

So just to quickly reiterate, the planetary joys are Mercury is said to rejoice in the first house. The Sun is said to rejoice in the 9th house, which is called the place of god. And as I said, the names of the places are obviously intimately intertwined into this diagram. And since the names of the places are first mentioned by the Hermes text on the dodecatropos, I think it also was the first text that introduced this planetary joys scheme. So Mercury in the first. The Sun in the 9th in the place of God. The Moon rejoices in the 3rd place, which is called the place of goddess. Venus is said to rejoice in the 5th place, which is called the place of good fortune, and that’s right next to Mars, which rejoices in the 6th place, which is the place of bad fortune. Saturn is – or Jupiter, let’s say, let’s go to Jupiter first. Jupiter rejoices in the 11th place or the 11th house, which is called the place of good spirit. And it’s next to Saturn, which rejoices in the 12th place, which is the place of bad spirit. 

So you know, in some of the texts, like later texts like Paulus, these are just presented as, like, associations between the planets and certain houses. But when you map them out and put them in a visual diagram, you start to see some really interesting and really obvious distinctions, such as, for example, that all of the daytime planets according to the doctrine of sect are in the top half of the chart, where you have the Sun in the 9th house, Jupiter in the 11th house, and Saturn in the 12th house. And all of the nocturnal planets are in the bottom half of the chart, which are the Moon, which is in the 3rd house, Venus which is in the 5th house, and Mars which is in the 6th house. The only other planet is Mercury, which is said to rejoice in the first house, and what’s interesting about that is that in Hellenistic astrology when you’re using whole sign houses, which I believe the original text of Hermes on the dodecatropos used – on the 12-turning used, Mercury can be in the first house, and when it’s at the Ascendant degree part of the first house is above the horizon in the sky, and part of the first house is below the horizon under the earth. So Mercury is really interesting here, because it’s literally the only planet that’s at the meeting point between the sky and the top half of the chart where the diurnal or daytime planets are, and the earth, which is everything in the bottom half of the chart is physically under the earth in terms of this diagram where all of the nocturnal planets are. 

So one of the things that I noted back then in 2012 then is this sets up this clear distinction where in the top of the chart, you have this solar hemisphere that has to do with the daytime planets but it’s also connected with the concept of the soul or the mind as well as the concept of spirit. And that’s why the 11th place is called the place of good spirit and the 12th place is called the place of bad spirit; it’s because they’re associating these concepts that are really connected partially with the Sun and some of its significations as well as the daytime planets as well with the concept of, like I said, the soul and the mind and the spirit and things conceptually related to those. Versus the bottom half of the chart is the lunar hemisphere, which has to do with the concept of fortune and the body and the concept of matter and physical incarnation, which are like, concepts that’s associating with lunar concepts primarily and especially. And what’s interesting about that then is you get this sort of progression where because this represents – the joys represents the 12 houses. So it’s like, it’s localizing things based on the moment of birth where you have the Ascendant, which is the eastern horizon, and then you have planets, the joys diagram and the 12 houses. Just like the name that Hermes gave it, the 12-turning, is because the 12 houses and the diurnal rotation are constantly turning and planets are constantly rising over the eastern horizon at the Ascendant functionally. So right here over the eastern horizon at the Ascendant or the hour-marker. And then planets are rising up and being pulled up by the diurnal rotation towards the Midheaven where they eventually culminate at the 10th whole sign house before they eventually pivot downwards and start to decline at the 9th house. And then eventually move towards the Descendant, wherein the 7th house they set, and they sink under the earth. And then they continue to decline from the 7th until eventually they reach the 4th house, where they pivot again. And pivot is part of the original meaning of the Greek word kentron, which was the original Greek word for the four angular houses. And then it pivots at the 4th and starts to decline away from the 4th, and then eventually the planets move into the 2nd, and then eventually they re-emerge at the Ascendant again every 24 hours basically, once a day. 

So what’s interesting about the planetary joys diagram is we’ve already established, like, the concept of sect. But what’s interesting is you have this sort of progression in terms of sect where if you think about the planets, Saturn and its position in the 12th would have recently changed sides, basically, and it would have moved from under the earth in the lunar realm of matter and sort of like, darkness and things like that; it would have emerged recently over the eastern horizon at the first house, and then moved into the 12th house. So it’s like, you get this interesting progression here with the diurnal planets where they start progressing from the least diurnal to more and more diurnal or let’s say daytime-like. So first to Saturn in the 12th, and then it progresses to Jupiter in the 11th, and then eventually you hit the peak and the high point of the concept of the daytime planets with the Sun. And then similarly, there’s a reverse thing with the nighttime planets where at the 7th house, the planets have recently set and moved away from the sort of, like, hot, bright, diurnal hemisphere of the day and the daytime planets. And the planets have suddenly moved under the earth and started to move through essentially the underworld and the realm of the night and of fortune and of matter and the nocturnal planets. So you again get this progression where it’s, like, Mars is sort of arguably the least nocturnal of the nocturnal planets, but it’s still on the nocturnal side. And then it progresses to Venus, which is even more nocturnal. And then eventually you get to the Moon in the 3rd, which is the sort of, like, height or the ideal of the nocturnal nighttime planets. 

So there’s some sort of like, progression and implicit notions about the doctrine of sect that are immediately apparent in the planetary joys scheme, especially if you realize what the joys scheme does and what it’s representing. 

One of the other things that seems to be built into the joys diagram is some awareness of the concept of aspects and good and bad aspects as well, where for example each of the luminaries is configured to the benefic planet that matches their sect by a sextile. And they’re configured to the malefic sect teammate by a square. So for example, the Sun in the 9th house is configured to the joy of Jupiter by a sextile in the 11th, and it’s configured by a square to Saturn in the 12th. Or the Moon, which rejoices in the 3rd, is configured to Venus by sextile, but to Mars by square. So this is where things get really, really interesting, though, because one of the things that I noticed back in 2012 is what happens if you draw aspect lines from the luminaries to Mercury. And this is what happens. If you draw an aspect line from the Sun, which remember is the sect light or the leader of the daytime sect, in the 9th house and you draw an aspect line to Mercury, you get a trine. Whereas if you draw an aspect line from the Moon in the 3rd house which is the luminary or the sect light associated with the nocturnal planets, you get a sextile. So what does that mean? It means implicit in the planetary joys diagram is the notion that the trine aspect is associated with the daytime planets, and the sextile aspect is associated with the nighttime planets. Where have we seen that before? We’ve seen that before explicitly in the connection that Porphyry and Antiochus point out between the signs of exaltation and the domicile scheme. Whereas Porphyry pointed out when you put the planets in their signs of exaltation, the daytime planets are configured to one of their domiciles by trine, and the nighttime planets are configured to one of their domiciles by sextile. So you get a distinction then of daytime planets trines and nighttime planets sextiles, and that same distinction is perfectly recreated in the planetary joys scheme where the Sun is configured to Mercury by trine and the Moon is configured to Mercury by sextile. That, my friends, is not a coincidence. That is a crazy, crazy repeating pattern and overlap which somebody seems like they deliberately wanted to include as part of these diagrams, presumably due to some sort of, like, overriding idea when it comes to ideas of, like, trines being associated with daytime planets and sextiles being associated with nighttime planets. That is, for most of the past decade that I’ve been talking about this and lecturing on it, the craziest connection and one of the most compelling connections that shows an interconnectedness and interlocking nature between a bunch of these different technical diagrams. And what’s crazy about that to me also is remember, I already established that the first text that talks about the planetary joys scheme is the text that’s attributed to Hermes Trismegistus on the dodecatropos or on the 12-turning or the 12-fold house system. So that was the original text that seems to have introduced the concept of the planetary joys. The author attributed it to Hermes, and look where – you know, look who’s right there in the first house who’s receiving that trine from the Sun and that sextile from the Moon. It’s the planet Mercury, which in Greek is called the planet Hermes. It’s really weird, because it’s, like, Hermes himself is literally at the central point in this diagram in the first house in the midpoint between the sky and the realm of the sky and the mind and the intellect and nous and spirit, and the lower realm of the body and the physical world and the Moon and fortune and all of those related concepts. And it’s almost like the author of this diagram is almost like, winking at you basically and saying, like, “Look. This is me. This is where I am. I have centralized myself here, and I’m attributing this text to Hermes Trismegistus, and I’m placing Hermes at the most central point in this diagram in the planetary joys diagram itself.” And it’s like, that would sound like a little bit too on-the-nose or a little bit like, I’m going too far. But I think it goes back to some of those, like, things I was talking about earlier where sometimes in the Egyptian priestly astrological texts like the Book of Thoth, they would have these funny little play on words and these little implicit secondary meanings that it’s like there’s a surface level meaning to the words or to the statement, but then there’s like, this secondary double entendre where these highly educated priests are – these highly literate priests in the Egyptian temples are – doing these fun little, like, mysterious occult writing word game things in order to play with the fluidity of words and the ability to sometimes hide additional hidden meanings behind the surface level of things. And on some level, it’s like, I think that’s part of what we’re seeing here. And for most of the past decade, that’s been sufficient enough for me to be thinking that this is some sort of deliberate technical construct that somebody put together in the second century BCE. But there’s more. I want to show you one more thing that we had found back in 2012, at least, and then I want to show you one additional connection that takes it even further that was just discovered in the past few years. 

All right, so the next thing I wanted to show you – this is something that Robert Schmidt first noticed and mentioned to both Ben Dykes and I back in 2008, which I believe it was 2008 was the last time I saw him early that year in person. And what Schmidt noticed is that the planetary joys scheme is actually – it represents the triplicity rulers grouped around the four angular triads that are groupings of the houses into four sets of three. So let me break down those two concepts. 

So one of the concepts is that there are, aside from the domicile scheme which is derived from the Thema mundi, there’s another set of rulerships basically where different signs of the zodiac are grouped into four sets of three called triplicities. And each of these triplicities were assigned three different rulers or three different planetary rulers. So I have a table on the left that shows the triplicity rulers, the three triplicity rulers that are associated with each of the four triplicities, which in the later tradition, eventually came to be associated with the four elements of Greek philosophy of like, fire, air, water, and earth. 

So what Schmidt noticed is that if you look, for example, if you know – it’s pretty obvious once you know the triplicity rulers, but if you’re coming from modern astrology or you’re not familiar with them, it may not be clear. But basically, the rulers of the fire triplicity signs, which are Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, are primarily the Sun and Jupiter. And what’s weird is that you see the Sun and Jupiter grouped up together in the top part of the chart in the sequence of three houses or the angular triad which surrounds the Midheaven or the 10th whole sign house. And I should explain what an angular triad is. 

So in Hellenistic astrology, one of the conceptual notions underlying the houses is that they’re grouped into these four sets of three that are surrounding the four angular houses. So let me show the big diagram again and go back to that. 

So the angular triads are this. It is – let’s start with the first house. So the angular triad surrounding the first house is a sequence of three houses. So the central point or the pivot or kentron is the first house, and so a planet in the first house is rising up over the eastern horizon or has just risen up over the eastern horizon. And then once it does that, it will move upwards and it will start to decline as it declines away from the first house when it reaches the 12th whole sign house. And then prior to that, a planet in the 2nd house will rise up after whatever planet is currently in the first house. So that sounds kind of complicated, but basically, it just means that there’s a sequence of three houses. That instead of thinking of each of the 12 houses as its own isolated area of space, instead the Hellenistic astrologers conceptualized the houses as a sequence of three houses surrounding each of the four angles. So in this instance, it is the sequence that goes 2nd house, first house, 12th house. And then the next sequence is surrounding the Midheaven, and it’s the 11th house, 10th house, and 9th house. Then we have the angular triad surrounding the Descendant, which is the 8th house, 7th house, and 6th house. And then finally we have the angular triad surrounding the IC or the subterraneous place, the 4th house, which is – the sequence goes 5th house, 4th house, 3rd house. 

And this notion of angular triads and grouping the houses in this way, it’s mentioned by Olympiodorus. It’s mentioned by the skeptic Sextus Impericus when he’s trying to explain the concept of houses. It’s mentioned in the context of a timing technique, I believe, by Serapio, the astrologer Serapio. So it comes up a bunch of different places either explicitly or implicitly, but functionally this was one of the implicit foundational concepts underlying the Hermes text on the dodecatropos or the 12-turning. And this is the reason why it’s called the 12-turning, because it’s describing this process of the diurnal rotation where the planets are constantly moving through these angular triads or these sequences of three houses where they’re constantly either rising up, hitting the peak, or declining away from the peak, essentially. And that’s really the foundational astronomical reality or structuring that then – that’s like, the astronomical reality that the astrologers then start deriving astrological or symbolic interpretations from. 

Okay. So that’s like, a foundational concept. And Schmidt noticed when you combine those two things, when you pay attention to the angular triads and you’re aware of the concept of the triplicity rulers, which are extremely important and prominent in major Hellenistic astrologers such as Dorotheus of Sidon and Vettius Valens especially, where the technique of triplicity rulers is, like, a crucial rulership scheme, when you are aware of that, you realize that the two rulers of the fire triplicity, the Sun and Jupiter, happen to be grouped around the angular triad surrounding the Midheaven. And the two rulers of the air triplicity, which are Saturn and Mercury, are grouped around the angular triad surrounding the Ascendant; they’re grouped together, like, literally right next to each other in the first and 12th house. The triplicity rulers of what we’ll call the earth triplicity or the earth signs of like, Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn, the two rulers of that triplicity are Venus and the Moon, and those two planets happen to be grouped around the angular triad that surrounds the IC and the 4th house, which is the 3rd house in the case of the Moon, and Venus has its joy in the 5th house. And then finally, the last planet that’s left over is Mars, and Mars happens to be the night triplicity ruler of the water signs, which are Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces. And we find Mars is in the angular triad surrounding the Descendant, which is like, the 8th house, 7th house, and 6th house where we find the joy of Mars. 

So what we immediately see then and what we realize is that the planetary joys scheme is also combining the concept of the angular triads with the concept of the triplicity rulers, which was a pretty crazy, like, observation that Schmidt found by 2008 or so. But then in 2012, Ben Dykes and I sat down and we had this, like, stretch of a few weeks in I think April of 2012 where we were really looking at the diagrams and trying to understand them better, and we started seeing a bunch of crazy connections. And I was really focused on that observation that Schmidt made, and then I saw something that made me take it a step further because I realized – and I don’t think that this is a step that Schmidt took, or I never heard him take that step – but the step that I took is realizing that what ended up happening is that implicit in the planetary joys diagram where the triplicity rulers are associated with the four angular triads is that they were applying cosmologically the doctrine of Aristotle’s doctrine of natural place and the notion of the different places in the cosmos that the elements rise to, basically. And let me switch to that; let me introduce that. 

So this is a concept that started with Aristotle, but then it becomes pretty ubiquitous in later Hellenistic philosophy, especially in Stoicism and even Hermeticism, where the notion was that there’s the four elements of Greek philosophy that were introduced earlier on before the time of Plato. I’m spacing out on the name of the philosopher right now, but I have a whole section of my book on this. And the basic premise is that fire, the element of fire rises to the very top of the cosmos, whereas the element of earth falls to the very bottom or center of the cosmos. So it has to do with, like, density to some extent. So fire rises to the topmost extreme, and earth falls to the bottommost extreme. Then air rises up towards the top, but then it ends up resting just below fire, whereas water falls down and settles on top of earth. 

So what you end up with, then, is in like, Hellenistic philosophy and in what became classical Greek philosophy from Aristotle forward is this doctrine of natural place. That you have this ordering of the elements in the cosmos where it goes fire, air, water, earth. And what I noticed in 2012 and got extremely excited about and then wrote that paper on was that the doctrine of natural place is actually the creators of the joys diagram implicitly had the doctrine of natural place in mind and applied it to this diagram. Where the way it works out is fire is up at the top of the diagram, which represents the top of the cosmos in the angular triad surrounding the Midheaven. And remember, the Midheaven and the 10th house is literally the place that is directly overhead when you look into the sky. So it’s literally outwards, like, towards the highest most portion of the cosmos or of the heavens. And there they assigned the element of fire in this diagram. 

Then opposite to that is the bottom half of the chart and you have the planets the Moon and Venus. And at the bottom half of the chart opposite to fire is earth, and you have this angular triad or this sequence of houses, which is the 5th, 4th, and 3rd that they associated with earth down at the very bottom of the cosmos. And one of the things you have to remember is the 4th house is the lowest part of the chart, and it’s the part basically that’s directly below the earth and directly below your feet whenever you’re trying to conceptualize the different houses and where they fall. Like, the 10th house is what’s directly overhead; the 4th house is what’s below your feet under the earth. And so they associated the element of earth with the sequence of planets of the 5th, 4th, and 3rd houses at the very bottom of the cosmos. Now, this is where it gets interesting, because then they have this grouping of two planets of Mercury and Saturn which are over here in the angular triad associated with the first house and the Ascendant. And remember, the first house is called the Ascendant because planets will rise up over the eastern horizon and emerge from under the earth and then move into visibility and move upwards into the sky. So what’s cool about that is that they put air over in the angular triad associated with the first house, because then air is literally rising up towards fire, but still essentially resting underneath the fire functionally. And then similarly, Mars is over here in this sequence of this angular triad associated with the 7th house and the Descendant, and at the 7th house, planets set under the earth in the west, basically. That’s where the Sun sets each day and moves from being in the sky and it being daytime; in the 7th house, the Sun sets under the earth and then it becomes nighttime. And all of the planets similarly sink under the earth around the 7th house. So what they did is they associated water, the element of water, with the angular triad surrounding the Descendant so that water is literally being pushed downwards and is being directed downwards towards earth and being submerged where it basically ends up coming to rest just above earth. 

So essentially what we have then is they’ve recreated the doctrine of natural place from Greek philosophy, and it’s embedded implicitly in this diagram. And what’s crazy about that is because these planets were already established as being rulers of certain signs – so for example, the Sun and Jupiter were established as ruling the signs Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius – and Mercury and Saturn were associated with the signs of Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius. What I think happened and what I proposed in my paper and I think I also mentioned this in my book is I think this is actually how the four elements of Greek philosophy came to be assigned to the signs of the zodiac. Because I think they established the elements first here in the joys diagram based on the doctrine of natural place, and I think they established the triplicity rulers, the planets as rulers of certain triplicities, based on certain dignity considerations that I’m not gonna get fully into to. But then what happened is they then imported those elemental qualities over into the signs of the zodiac eventually, which – let me pull up a diagram – which eventually as a result of the triplicity rulers being associated with those signs of the zodiac, it then imported the elements that were associated with the triplicity rulers in the planetary joys scheme and then applied those to the signs of the zodiac. And so that’s why Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, for example, came to be associated with the element of fire. And that’s why Taurus and Virgo and Capricorn came to be associated with the element of earth. That’s why Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius came to be associated with the element of air, and that’s why Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces came to be associated with the element of water. 

So that was my conclusion back then, and it was a huge discovery because basically I’ve discovered and found out and realized in a relatively short span of time how the 12 signs of the zodiac came to have the four elements of Greek philosophy applied to them sometime in the early foundational period of Hellenistic astrology, and potentially in the Hermes text itself, which is the one, as I’ve argued, that introduced the planetary joys scheme. And what’s interesting about that is like, not all Hellenistic astrologers adopted the associations of the four classical elements with the signs of the zodiac. So for example, Ptolemy doesn’t mention or doesn’t apply the four elements to the signs of the zodiac. But Vettius Valens, for example, does. And Firmicus seems to as well. And also there may be a reference to in Hephaistio where Dorotheus may have mentioned the elements in connection with the signs of the zodiac as well, possibly. So I think the reason for this is that – actually, that’s kind of complicated. But I think it’s because it sets up a competing set of Stoic qualities in association with each of the elements that are opposite to other elements. And this matched essentially like, functionally Stoic and Hermetic philosophy that treated the water signs as wet, and the air signs as cold, but it came into conflict with Aristotelian philosophy which tended to treat the air signs as wet and the water signs as cold. 

So here’s a diagram that demonstrates that. And these are the qualities that Vettius Valens, for example, attributes to the signs of the zodiac where he doesn’t just say that, like, fire – he says fire is hot, as it’s underlying inherent quality. And that the fire signs are opposite to the air signs because the air signs are cold. And then by contrast, the water signs are wet, and they’re all opposite to the earth signs which are dry. So it creates this fundamental contrast which if you go back to, like, Greek philosophy and Aristotle, the notion that the qualities have opposites is kind of like, important and is kind of part and parcel with the entire doctrine. But what happened is that the Stoic and Hermetic philosophical schools went a certain way with attributing qualities to the elements, but the Aristotelian school went a different way. And this is, I think, the reason why some astrologers in the Hellenistic tradition, some of the later astrologers like Valens or Firmicus apparently and eventually Rhetorius adopted this scheme of associating the elements with the signs of the zodiac, but other astrologers like Ptolemy noticeably don’t, because I think some of the astrologers like Ptolemy who had more Aristotelian inclinations would have been uncomfortable with these scheme because it places water as the quality of wet opposite to earth as the quality of dry, and air as the quality of cold opposite to fire as the quality of hot. So to make a long story short, it’s interesting from a historical – from the perspective of ancient philosophy, because this is literally, the astrologers were literally taking philosophical concepts from Greek philosophy and they were applying them in very practical ways within the context of their form of symbolism and divination in very, very practical ways. But they were – the different philosophical schools that influenced them were at odds with each other. And so sometimes it created, like, competing philosophical doctrines that didn’t mesh well or didn’t get along, and therefore rifts or differences in practice in the Hellenistic astrological tradition that ultimately motivated by or go back to fundamental differences between different philosophical schools, such as Aristotle’s school versus the Stoic school, basically. 

So I got into that a lot more in my book in the chapter on the elements, because I spent a lot of time researching that and understanding it. But it’s one of the very interesting ways in which it’s hard to explain, but it would be more interesting to, like, a historian of ancient philosophy if it wasn’t such a highly technical thing. But it is one of the ways in which ancient philosophy directly impacted the practice of Hellenistic astrology, and in which we can see that probably the foundational author of the planetary joys scheme, which is probably the author of the Hermes text on the dodecatropos, that this person, whoever it was and wherever they were – probably in Alexandria, perhaps in the temples of Egypt – was directly incorporating elements from Greek philosophy and Stoicism and Hermeticism in a very practical, hands-on way in this astrological construct.

All right. That brings us to the final and perhaps most important and definitely most recent discovery related to the planetary joys scheme that happened just a few years ago where my friend, Benjamin Dykes, I was talking to him. I think it was in 2023. And he noticed this really brilliant structural overlap between the exaltations and the planetary joys scheme that just absolutely blew my mind and took my breath away, and it still does. I’ve still been grappling with it even three years later. 

So here it is. Let’s set this up. So here’s the planetary joys scheme. Remember the exaltations, which as I showed and talked about were inherited from Mesopotamian astrology and date back to at least 1000 BCE and the Hellenistic astrologers inherited and incorporated into their technical system. So what Ben noticed is this. When you take the exaltations, which in the previous diagram we had Jupiter on the Ascendant with Cancer rising. If you turn the exaltations and you bring the Moon to the Ascendant – the Moon in Taurus to the Ascendant – so that Taurus is rising, then the exaltations diagram and specifically the distribution of planets in the exaltations diagram perfectly maps out or mirrors the distribution of planets in the planetary joys scheme. So let me switch to another diagram to demonstrate better what I mean by that. 

Okay, so over on the left, imagine you have the exaltations on the left with the Moon in the first house. And it goes you have a planet, so you have the Moon in Taurus in the first, and then upwards you have the Sun in Aries in the 12th. And then you have Venus exalted in Pisces, which would be in the 11th. So similarly, over on the right in the planetary joys diagram, you have Mercury has – it rejoices in the first house. Then upwards you have Saturn rejoicing in the 12th house, and then you have Jupiter rejoicing in the 11th house. So that what I mean then is by that – you have the same distribution where you have, starting from the first house basically, three planets in a row. So first house, 12th house, 11th house. 

Then back to the left diagram for those watching the video version. In the exaltations, if you go up to the 9th house, if you’re measuring relative to Taurus, you have Mars, which is exalted in Capricorn. And that mirrors in the planetary joys scheme the Sun, which has its joy in the 9th house. Then if you go down below, you have in the exaltations you have Saturn exalted in Libra, which would be in the 6th house, and you have Mercury exalted in Virgo, which would be the 5th house. And that mirrors the planetary joys where you have a planet, Mars, rejoicing in the 6th, and the planet Venus rejoicing in the 5th. And then finally the last planet is Jupiter, which in the exaltations if you have Taurus rising would be in the 3rd house,and this matches the planetary joys scheme where you have the Moon rejoicing in the 3rd house. So that’s what I mean by the same distribution of planets is replicated from the exaltation scheme into the planetary joys. So I’ll switch back. Now you can see it more clearly with the exaltations on the left with Taurus rising, and the planetary joys on the right. 

So what’s crazy about this is what it means is that the creator of the planetary joys scheme used the exaltations and took the exaltations as a foundational construct in order to then derive the planetary joys scheme, essentially. And they took that same distribution, essentially, of planets with the Moon brought to the Ascendant with Taurus rising, and then they kind of, like, projected the houses from there and projected the planetary joys scheme from there and applied them to create the planetary joys diagram, which therefore creates this incredible structural overlap between the ancient exaltations from Mesopotamia and this new technical construct that was created in the second century BCE by these astrologers associated with this collection of Hermetic astrological texts, but specifically – and this is the part that’s really crazy – as I said, the planetary joys scheme, the first reference we have to it is the text of Hermes Trismegistus that was on the dodecatropos or the 12-turning. That is the text that can easily be textually argued introduced the planetary joys scheme, and therefore it must have been the one and it must have been, whoever the author was behind that text, must have been the one who took the exaltations and then basically created the planetary joys scheme out of them like this. And that’s just absolutely stunning when you think about all of the different concepts then that were truly, like, brought together or that were united in this one diagram of the planetary joys scheme. 

And one of the things that I’ve really been trying to work on and figure out this summer as I’ve been sitting here working on this and rereading a bunch of ancient Hermetic philosophical texts, and I’ve been trying to work through these different diagrams and their interconnections and to try to like, reverse engineer how the author or the creator of this system must have come up with all of this and made it fit together, and trying to see if I could tease out, like, what the sequence was of which things would have been developed at which point. And Ben Dykes has actually been doing some really impressive work on that as well over the past several months and had a big breakthrough with the bounds, with the Egyptian bounds, which I’ll let him hopefully announce and explain at some point. But he’s also been working along parallel lines. But for me, I’ve been sitting with this, seeing that the exaltations were the basis of the planetary joys scheme, and trying to go back to Hermetic philosophy and kind of understand what the implication was or if there’s any deeper philosophical principles that we might be able to tease out. 

In particular, one of the things that’s interesting is it seems to show this sort of lunar focus here where, for some reason, the Moon is becoming the focal point or they’ve decided to make the Moon the focal point. And one of the things that’s interesting about that is it’s raised on the one hand this question about whether the exaltations are inherently lunar, which is a question that sort of astrologers have been kicking around I think since Schmidt first suggested or raised that question for different reasons. But in this instance, one of the things that this reminds me of is it reminds me of how this is almost, like, a lot-like calculation, and it reminds me a little bit of the Lot of Fortune and how some of the houses, especially in the Egyptian tradition, were being calculated as lots. Because in this instance, they really brought the Moon to the Ascendant here from the exaltations, and then they’re projecting out or they’re deriving other house meanings or significations from that position. So in a way, one of the implicit things here, because they’re projecting it from the Moon, and the Moon was fundamentally in Hellenistic astrology associated with the concept of fortune and the body and the physical incarnation, is that by projecting the dodecatropos from the Moon in the exaltations, the Hermes text may have been almost, like, projecting the concept of fortune or even the wheel of fortune and that sort of idea conceptually onto the concept of the angular triads with their constant rising and declining motion that’s constantly turning and bringing certain planets up to the angles and then pivoting and bringing certain planets down. So that’s one of the, like, as I’ve been playing with this this summer, that’s one of the conceptual models that I’m sort of like, thinking of as I’m trying to understand what the implicit philosophical assumptions were that this Hermetic author was making when they constructed this and decided to project the joys from the Moon in the exaltations. 

Another idea that I was kicking around that’s possible is I thought of, like, one of the things that’s interesting is the exaltations, when you superimpose them on the Thema mundi and Jupiter is in the first house. So part of what you do then in order to create the joys scheme is that you have to turn the chart, and you have to move the Moon, which is in the 11th house, which is in the place – the 11th house is called the place of good spirit, which in Greek is agathodaemon. You have to take the Moon from the place of agathodaemon, and you turn the chart and you bring it to the first house, which in the planetary joys scheme becomes the house associated with Mercury through the planetary joys. And like, one of the things I think and I suspect about that is it may be another one of those cute little hidden or occult things where the author of the Hermetic text, of the Hermes text, may be winking at us again because that may be describing the way that the text was first presented, which is possibly or potentially as revelation from the god Agathodaemon or Kneph to Hermes Trismegistus. Literally to Hermes. And that’s why in the process of like, calculating the joys, you literally have to turn the Moon from its 11th house position, which is known by that alternate name of agathodaemon, or good spirit, and you have to bring the Moon in the place of good spirit to the first house, to the place of Hermes. So it’s almost like, physically or symbolically potentially representing the revelatory premise of that Hermetic text itself, which we know for a fact was the premise of some later Hermetic astrological texts, such as the one that Abu Ma’shar had access to, the lost Greek text that he had access to where it was presented in the form of – it was a technical text that was presented in the form of some sort of dialogue or revelation from Agathodaemon to Hermes Trismegistus. And that may have then, even though I think that’s a later text from the 3rd century forward, it may have been imitating this earlier Hermetic text that was presented under the same paradigm. And I just find it really weird and kind of astounding that they may have, like, embedded the very mythology of the story in the process of what you do in order to derive the astrological technique of the planetary joys scheme. 

Okay, so that’s one piece. Another theory that I’ve been working with this summer is there’s a really famous line or famous rule that’s associated with Petosiris. And it’s connected with this notion of the conception chart versus the birth chart. And the famous rule, which is usually associated with birth chart or natal rectification dictated that the sign of the Moon as the moment of a person’s conception would become the rising sign or the Ascendant of the person at birth. And so, for example, in Porphyry’s introduction in chapter 38, it has this rule where it says, 

“Petosiris says that where the Moon was at conception, it or its diameter marks the hour for birth. And where the Moon was at birth, he says, it marks the hour for conception.” 

So one of the ideas that I’ve been playing with then is a possible notion that, like, if Taurus is brought to the rising sign, that that may be – that Taurus may represent the birth in some sense, because it’s brought to the – essentially Taurus becomes the Ascendant. But that the sign of the Moon may represent the conception in some way. 

So I don’t know if that makes sense. But basically, I’m trying to work this out, but if that follows, then it would be something like the exaltations in the Thema mundi where the Moon is in the 11th house may represent something about the conception of either the system or the conception of the human soul and its ultimate source from somewhere else in some higher or exalted position or realm, whereas the Moon when it’s brought to the Ascendant in the planetary joys scheme and you turn it, basically that becomes birth. And it’s doing some sort of analogy between the moment of birth versus the moment of conception, and that the founders of Hellenistic astrology may have used their own obscure rule, essentially, to mechanically the shift the cosmos to generate the chart of humanity, basically, which is what the joys become, is the chart structure for human life on earth, as opposed to perhaps this idea that the exaltations may have represented something higher or the origin of human existence in the spiritual realm elsewhere, which is part of that common Hermetic premise. 

So where I was going with that is that this mechanical shift itself may imply that the exaltations were thought to originate from the higher realm of god or nous. And that this may be connected, then, with this core tenet of Hermeticism that we each have a spark of nous from the heavens that then eventually descends into the physical world and gets encased in the physical body. So if this is true, then it would be like, this really interesting additional subtext that’s embedded by the system’s creator where they’re weaving something about the foundational mythology directly into the math basically of the diagrams, sort of like how earlier the descent of the soul and some of that conceptualization is embedded in the seven-zoned spheres.

So I’m still playing with this, but if this is true, it might be connected to a doctrine that shows up a lot in the later philosophical Hermetica that’s especially prominent in the Latin text known as the Asclepius, which is also known in Greek as The Perfect Discourse. But in this text and other Hermetic philosophical texts, there’s this notion that there’s these three tiers in Hermeticism. And tier one represents god and the concept of nous, which is sort of like the highest level of reality in Hermeticism which is the realm of the transcendent god, or nous or divine mind. And astrologically, it’s possible that the Hermetic author of this was somehow representing this by the exaltations, which is interesting because practically speaking, the exaltations become associated with, like, eminence, those that are prominent, things that are raised up to the highest level in Hellenistic astrology, and interestingly this would be referring back to some sort of idealized eminent realm of divine conception before the descent into matter. So that’s tier one in Hermeticism. 

Tier two would be the level of the cosmos and the demiurge or the creator god, which is the cosmos itself. And so this is the second tier in Hermetic philosophy, especially in the text of the philosophical Asclepius or The Perfect Discourse. And the second level is the sensible physical cosmos itself, which is viewed as a visible second god or craftsman. And this is represented by the Thema mundi itself, which is the mythical birth chart and the structural blueprint, essentially, of the macrocosm. And that’s why potentially why we have Antiochus of Athens calling the Thema mundi not just the birth chart of the cosmos, but the birth chart of god. And if that’s true, then it would be calling it that because it would be the second god, basically, or the cosmos itself as a craftsman god which is the second tier in Hermetic philosophy. 

So eventually that brings us to the 3rd tier, which is humanity and the microcosm. And in Hermetic philosophy, in the Corpus Hermeticum a few different places, the third level of reality consists of individual humans who are seen as a microcosm or a miniature image of the larger cosmos and of the larger cosmic animal or cosmic god, which is the tier two cosmic demiurge. And this is where I think the planetary joys scheme may complete this triad or may have completed this triad for this second century Hermetic author of the dodecatropos where the planetary joys scheme may represent the localized human condition and essentially, like, the chart of humanity in some ways. And all of the different areas that individual humans encounter during their time here on earth, which are fundamentally all of the basic significations of the houses like life, possessions, siblings, home and parents, children, illness, relationships, death, travel, career, friends, and enemies. So it’s all of the individual things that we encounter when we are down here physically incarnated as souls or sparks of the nous or the divine mind that have come down here to earth and traveled through the planetary spheres and picked up the qualities of the planets and then become incarnated in whatever our life is where we play out our fate, essentially. 

So this is where I’ve been going with this, and again, this is highly speculative, but it’s my attempts to try to look at the later Hermetic philosophical principles that are underlying or acting in commonality between multiple Hermetic texts, especially really important ones like the Asclepius text, and then see if some of those Hermetic philosophical principles and things that they’re commonly taking for granted cosmologically could help us to understand some of the philosophical or cosmological principles that the author of this Hermetic text might have been taking into account. And it’s possible then that the sort of synthesis is that by physically turning the wheel to project the exaltations down onto the Ascendant to create the joys, that the astrological mechanics are meant to describe the central Hermetic doctrine, which is the notion that a divine spark of nous descends through the cosmos to become eventually encased in the human body. And that is my treatment of the planetary joys scheme. 

All right, my friends. That brings us to the end of this lecture and to the final section where I just want to make some concluding remarks and some summaries to wrap everything up. So yeah, in that last section, those are all of the major technical overlaps between the different parts of the system that I’ve found up to this point that are really worth mentioning. There may be some other minor ones that I didn’t mention or could have, but decided not to go into. And ultimately, there may still be other significant overlaps or technical things embedded in the system that I haven’t even found yet, or that my friend Ben Dykes hasn’t found yet or that others haven’t found yet. So part of the reason why I wanted to outline all of this is I wanted to finally get down what the current state of research is and to get down the core stuff of everything I know about this up to this point. 

And my hope is that, you know, I’m gonna keep working on this and seeing if I can find other things. But I’m hoping that this will spark some ideas in other people, and there might be some additional observations by others in the future as well – other people who watch this episode, that it will spark some ideas and perhaps there’ll be some new discoveries. So we’ll see what happens. 

I wanted to give a shout out to Benjamin Dykes because, like I said, a lot of some of the core stuff with the joys we discovered together in 2012 in a series of discussions, and then he was the one that a few years ago in 2023 made the new observation about the joys being derived from the exaltation distributions basically. And I know he’s working on some other stuff right now related to the Thema mundi and the foundations of Hellenistic astrology and the bounds that is very, very exciting, and he’s made some additional discoveries just in the past few months that I will be excited once he puts that out there for everybody to see it, because there’s more to be found and Ben has already found some of it. But shout out to Ben, because he’s been, yeah, one of my greatest friends and collaborators when it comes to some of this work, trying to reconstruct the origins of Hellenistic astrology. 

All right. So let’s do some summary stuff. So you know, we’ve traced the original roots of ancient astrology from the omen traditions of Mesopotamia to the use of the decans for timekeeping and other purposes in the Egyptian temples, and finally to the development of those different spherical cosmologies of the Greeks. And my ultimate takeaway here which should be obvious is that Hellenistic astrology was not a haphazard sort of passive blending of these older cultures, but instead it appears to be this really brilliant deliberate invention that meticulously engineered or was meticulously engineered by a person or a specific group of astrologers sometime probably in the second century BCE, probably in Alexandria, and ultimately while we don’t know exactly who these people were – they may have been Greeks connected with the Library of Alexandria. They may have been astrologer-priests connected with the Egyptian temples. They may have been Mesopotamian astrologers or something for all we know. It’s really hard to say. However, some of the new archeological discovers that are coming out about the practice of astrology in the Egyptian temples, as well as the recent innovations in reframing our understanding of the philosophical and technical Hermetic traditions, are really starting to point in the direction of Hermeticism being something that emerged in some way in close connection with the priests in the Egyptian temples and specifically the astrologer-priests or the hour-watcher priests who were practitioners of astrology and astronomy, who were not just fluent in Egyptian religion and mythology and science and other things like that connected with the decans, but were also fluent in Greek philosophy as well, and able to translate some of their own Indigenous philosophical and religious concepts into the language of Greek. And they were also people who were actively involved in translating texts on Mesopotamian astrology from cuneiform sources into Egyptian or potentially into Greek at the same time. So it increasingly seems like the likely locus point or focal point of activity may have been with the Egyptian astrologers living in the Egyptian temples in the second century BCE, especially those who chose to attribute their texts to figures such as Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, and Nechepso and Petosiris. So that’s really cool, because it may mean fundamentally that the origins of Hellenistic astrology lie with the Egyptian priesthood, which is a really, really cool thing to see and might have interesting implications in a number of different ways. 

And one of the things we do have to keep in mind, though, is that there are continual archeological discoveries. And some archeological discoveries may confirm some of our suspicions or may help to firm up some of the conclusions that I’ve presented here, however either strong or tenuous, whereas other new archeological discoveries may force us to revise our understanding of the history of astrology or how certain things were developed. And so we have to remain open to that and like, avoid becoming too dogmatic about certain conclusions, even though they seem really tempting and obviously I’m confident enough about certain ones to put them out here in this format, which has some degree of permanence. But there’s just been so many interesting archaeological discoveries that I want to remain open to, you know, other things in the future could come out and it could change things, and then we go back to the drawing board and then we adjust our thinking to adapt to the new data. And I think there’s something really valuable in that that I’ve always in myself tried to cultivate, which is sometimes like, you have a historical theory, and it works out and it later gets validated. Other times you might have a historical theory and then something comes out that invalidates it, in which case you just got to like, live up to that and then revise your thinking and move on basically. 

So we’ll see how things stand up in the future, but right now I’ve tried my best for the most part to present stuff that’s relatively safe and seems safe and relatively uncontroversial. The only thing where it was like, starting to get a little speculative there is the last piece where I’m trying to figure out how Hermetic philosophy and identifying those, like, three levels of god, cosmos, and man that’s embedded in some of the later philosophical texts might have been incorporated into some of these diagrams by these Hermetic authors in the second century BCE. But at least it’s, like, pointing in a direction of things that are worth exploring and hopefully we can continue to have different dialogues about what makes sense and what seems plausible or not as plausible in the long-term. 

But ultimately, one of the things that this does and one of the conclusions here reaffirms the central thesis of my book, Hellenistic Astrology, that was published in 2017, which is that I think that the authors who were writing under the pseudonyms, especially the one that wrote the text under the name Hermes Trismegistus who wrote the text on the dodecatropos or the 12-fold system, but also the authors of the Asclepius texts and the Nechepso and Petosiris texts, I think that these founders and especially the first one who was behind the Hermes text who created the joys scheme engineered this interlocking framework that was fundamentally designed to study a person’s fate and to predict the future. So this is why I subtitled my book Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, because I think that Hellenistic astrology was fundamentally designed as a technical construct that was meant to be able to understand and interpret a person’s fate, but also predict their future and predict the ways in which fortune at different points in a person’s life sort of like, raises people up and other times brings people down due to the notions of time and impermanence that are very prominent in Hermetic philosophy. 

So as we just saw with the mystical vision of Nechepso, some of these foundational astrological manuals were not just like, math and mechanics, but they were the first iterations, I believe, of the Hermetic philosophical tradition. Or at least a very early iteration of that, of something that would become more common and more prominent and, you know, there may have been, like, other competing schools, and that’s one of the tricky things about the astrology in particular is this would have – like, the introduction of this new system by the Hermetic authors in the second century BCE, I believe it introduced some significant pieces of a new foundation of astrology that just like, took off and became wildly popular in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially from the second and first century BCE forward. And then from that point forward, it’s just like, all over the place, and it’s mentioned in Greek and Roman culture, in Egyptian culture, and all sorts of different – it’s influencing different politics and religion and philosophy and all sorts of other things. 

So there’s something about that system that does have this interesting, like, singular technical construct that emerges from that small collection of texts in the second century BCE. But you know, there would have been different lines of transmission from Mesopotamia, and there would have been different astrologers that took that system in different ways or developed different techniques or other techniques from the earlier Mesopotamian or Egyptian astrological traditions that would have created a fair amount of diversity, which we can see in some of the later Hellenistic astrologers like Dorotheus and Valens and Ptolemy and Firmicus and Rhetorius and what have you. And it’s like, some of that variation is coming from different ways of applying or choosing different pieces of the earlier foundational texts to emphasize or different combinations of them. But some of it represents genuine variations in the astrological tradition. 

So I don’t know where to go with that, but it’s just, it goes back to the heart of something I really discussed in my book, which is the gradual development versus sudden invention argument where obviously now you can see why I lean towards the sudden invention argument of Hellenistic astrology due to the interlocking nature of this technical framework that seems to have been introduced especially in the Hermes text. But that doesn’t mean that there was just this one singular form of Hellenistic astrology necessarily that did create a lot of continuity, but there were also different traditions and different variations. And so I want to be careful, because that’s why I ended the last page of my book the way that I did, because I was aware of the tendency sometimes for groups when they go back and start idealizing older traditions to adopt a sort of, like, fundamentalism that there’s only one way or something like that when I think we should be careful about that because astrology has always been a living entity that’s constantly growing and changing in different ways. And even some of the foundational authors of the Hellenistic tradition disagreed with each other, evidently, because for example, the way that the Asclepius text moves around some of the significations of the Hermes text. Like, for example, Hermes having death in the 7th house, in the setting sign, but then the Asclepius text moving death to the 8th house. So even in that – whatever that foundational period was like and however either close together those authors were or however far apart they were, it’s hard to say. But even there we can notice that sometimes even the foundational authors disagreed with each other and did things differently. So we should expect nothing different today. And that great diversity in the astrological tradition is actually one of its greatest assets in many ways, because out of a diversity of many different astrological traditions, like, that’s how we got Hellenistic astrology in the first place, because it was partially the merging of those two long astrological traditions from Mesopotamia and Egypt that eventually were merged into one. And yeah, so I wanted to caution a little bit about that. But yeah, back to wrapping this up. The interlocking architecture. 

So the founders of Hellenistic astrology or founder, as the case may be, obviously took the raw materials of the past – like the Mesopotamian exaltations especially – and then just like, seamlessly integrated them into this new schematic architecture built on these interlocking diagrams, such as the Thema mundi, which was the mythical birth chart of the cosmos, you have the seven-zoned sphere that provided this three-dimensional depth creating a framework for the physical ascent and descent of the souls vertically through the planetary spheres as opposed to, as I talked about, the Thema mundi creating the domicile scheme, and these notions of right versus left, as well as aspects that go forward versus backwards. And then finally we have the planetary joys scheme, which is the third or fourth major foundational technical construct which is the localized chart for humanity and for human life. And one of the things that’s really cool about that is that it’s called the dodecatropos, which on a physical level means in Greek 12-turning. But the word tropos can also mean a path or a way. And the 12-turning may also have meant or dodecatropos of Hermes may have also meant the 12-fold way, because it was describing these 12 different not just areas of life, but these 12 different directions that life can be focused towards, especially by the ruler of the Ascendant and the first house, which the Hermes text referred to as the helm, using probably some sort of nautical metaphor about the chart being like a ship and the ruler of the Ascendant being like the captain of the ship that steers or directs the life in certain directions. And I think one of the fundamental premises of the early Hermest text is that you could use the birth chart in order to identify something about your fate and your future and the direction that you were supposed to go in life ultimately in order to fulfill your destiny. 

So they didn’t just invent a system for fortunetelling, but they actually built an entire architecture for studying and understanding an individual’s fate. And in doing so, they essentially gave us the exact tools that astrologers still use to this day to navigate the material world and to understand our place in the cosmos. And in that way, I think Hellenistic astrology represents an extremely successful system that’s been with us for more than 2,000 years now, and despite it morphing and growing and changing in so many different ways, is still very much recognizable as that system that was introduced already in the Hermes text in the second century BCE. And there’s something incredibly compelling and beautiful about that and about the survival of that system. 

All right, my friends. This is it! That is it. That is the end of the episode, and that’s the end of the lecture. Thank you so much for watching this. Shout out to all the patrons that support my work and research. All of them – I’m gonna give you access for this episode for, like, weeks or maybe like, a month before I release it, because it’s gonna take me quite a while to edit this. But thank you so much to those of you especially who support this work and research. I took a lot of time this summer just like, from not podcasting every week just to sit down with like, mounds of books and articles and reading so much about ancient Hermeticism and Egyptian history and all these different things in order to put all of this together and to try to combine everything I know, and I appreciate those of you who support that work and research especially through my page on Patreon, because that’s what makes this all possible. 

So let me know if you have any comments or questions, preferably below this video on YouTube if you’re watching it there. And yeah. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and I’ll see you again next time! 

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