Which makes it sound even fuzzier for me, surely if you are using the example of an actual house then once you have opened the garden gate then your dynamics have shifted. This strikes me as the most sensitive point.

In any event I was just posting to question Hervaros's asumption that there is some energising going on at 27 degrees, doubtless some characters who define themselves as modern astrologers argue this but its not an opinion I have come across voiced by the more highbrow types.

Kirk,

I have a slightly different take on this, but I have no hard documentation to back it up. According to the online Etymological dictionary the first English use of the word "cusp" was astrological:

cusp
1580s, from L. cuspis "point, spear, pointed end." Astrological use is earliest.

The astrological use in English is earliest and only dates from the 16th century. To me this sounds like the word was chosen by an astrologer, and it became standard usage. If the idea of house cusp meant beginning, why would anyone choose a word from Latin that meant "point?" Why not coin a word from the Latin that meant "beginning?" Obviously I don't have the answer.

Bonatti wrote in Latin and prior to the 16th century. What Latin word did he use where we use "cusp?" Ben? Ben?

Tom

. . . once you have opened the garden gate then your dynamics have shifted.

Yes, your dynamics are shifted ? you are now facing a garden. But wouldn't the dynamics of the garden experience be stronger if you were within the garden ? surrounded by it ? and not standing at the gate looking in?

Which makes it sound even fuzzier for me, surely if you are using the example of an actual house then once you have opened the garden gate then your dynamics have shifted. This strikes me as the most sensitive point.

Apparently we aren't going to agree on the meaning of fuzzy, either. If you have important business to discuss, you don't discuss it at the front door. You go inside the house. If you are standing in the entrance way still wearing your coat and hat, the dynamics haven't shifted. The temperature has. When you remove your hat and coat and take a seat at a table or in the living room, then the dynamics shift.

Tom

Tom,

Good point! (Good cusp? ) I was assuming that the mathematical and architectural usage of cusp would have come first. I suppose I wasn't willing to let astrology be first.

But I think my somewhat unrelated comments regarding Sun-signs and the expression 'on the cusp of' still look possible.

It looks like astrologers became confused over whether house cusps were points of intensity within the houses or were the beginning of the houses.

Astrologers confused? Never!

Kirk wrote:

. . . once you have opened the garden gate then your dynamics have shifted.

Yes, your dynamics are shifted ? you are now facing a garden. But wouldn't the dynamics of the garden experience be stronger if you were within the garden ? surrounded by it ? and not standing at the gate looking in?

As soon as the gate is opened you are in the others environment, it is their land, nurtured in a way which tells you about their relationship to the place they inhabit. . Your psychology shifts knowing you are now somewhere owned/lived in by someone else.

Going into the etymology then if we imagine cusp as point then the gate is the point of transition surely, not Toms notion of some intense banter in the salon.

The modern view, if it is modern, is that the middle of the house has more intensity. As to why the extent to which this is empirical or theeoretical or both eludes me tonight.

As soon as the gate is opened you are in the others environment . . .

Uh . . . no, you're really not. You are at the entrance to it. Once at the opened gate you could turn around and walk away from the garden without ever having been inside. You can be perfectly truthful in replying 'No' later in a court of law when asked if you were in that garden.

But then who even needs gates and doors? There is a good argument that you are within a person's environment when you are standing across the street, staring at their house and very loudly playing a trumpet. In other words, is an astrological house simply an "environment"?

Kirk wrote:

As soon as the gate is opened you are in the others environment . . .

Uh . . . no, you're really not. You are at the entrance to it. Once at the opened gate you could turn around and walk away from the garden without ever having been inside. You can be perfectly truthful in replying 'No' later in a court of law when asked if you were in that garden.

But then who even needs gates and doors? There is a good argument that you are within a person's environment when you are standing across the street, staring at their house and very loudly playing a trumpet. In other words, is an astrological house simply an "environment"?

I think you will find in a court of law that if the tip of your finger went over the boundary of the property it would be argued you had entered the others domain,

The trumpet player and the sunshine entering your conservatory maybe in your environment but is either in your house, i'm not sure where we would go with this as the noise and the atoms of the shine are but neither the player or the sun is.

Anyway what is an astrological house, the simple answer for me is where something happens. So going back to the OP's Jupiter in either the 4th or 5th issue is this persons sense of family a bit over expansive, confident, optimistic,,, are they perhaps prone to patriotism, have a benevolent relationship with the 'father', etc or does none of this resonate sufficiently.

Hello, Gabrel, Herman, Tom and all

GR wrote: looking at the Tetrabiblos, I'm not sure Ptolemy is using signs or divisions for the topical places, or using topical places very much at all. Taking as an example, book 3, chapter 4, he seems to prefer to focus on sect and planetary relationships to judge topics. In chap 5 of the same book, he's taking as the place of the mother whichever sign Venus or the Moon is in, based on natal sect.

This is true. For me coming from horary it was quite difficult to enter into Ptolemy logic, because my mind always goes to house rulers rather than significators.
Anyway Ptolemy uses houses, he mentions them in several chapters of Tetrabiblos, the most well known is the chapter about prorogation.

About which house system, this is unclear- because if we would have an evidence everybody would be in agreement, and this is not the case.
Bezza tends to think to Placido- in his site there are since many years a couple of articles written in 1986 about the Medieval use (Ibn Ezra) of the so called Placido system. Anyway I'm going to go hear Bezza and his friend Fumagalli about the house system method the next week, so I will report.

hervaro wrote:Hence we have such things like Sabian symbols. Terms, faces are examples of other beacons where trespassing implies another kind of quality. This change of quality is maximised at a sign's boundaries, obviously.
As a repentant former modern astrologer, I am since then fascinated by this idea of every degree of the zodiac marking a distinct quality. Hence we have such things like Sabian symbols. Terms, faces are examples of other beacons where trespassing implies another kind of quality. This change of quality is maximised at a sign's boundaries, obviously.
As a repentant former modern astrologer, I am since then fascinated by this idea of every degree of the zodiac marking a distinct quality.

Well, if there is something I deeply dislike are the Sabian symbols, and the story how Jones had from a medium with health problems, which was chosen for her debility.

Anyway traditional astrology has its "Sabian" symbols, which are the degrees of Astrolabium Planum, the book written in Middle Ages by Pietro Abano and edited a couple of centuries later by Angelus/Engels , who added the nice Renaissance pictures according the fashion of the period.

There is a slight different Medieval version, produced in the Court of Alphonse the Wise, and arrived in the Vatican Library, as inheritance from the Queen Christine of Sweden, the daughter of Gustavus Adolphus.

Both the books are based on the hellenistic stellar catalogues known in the Middle Ages, through the work of Albumasar.

They are astronomical because based on the positions of the stars, rather than the a result of the mind of a poor woman.

In Renaissance they had a lot of success. A couple of years ago I visited a palace which walls were painted with the constellations, paranatellonta, taken by Firmicus and Manilius. Every zodiacal sign, instead of being accompanied by the traditional iconography, is depicted according the hellenistic astrologers for a given paranatellonta rising with that sign. It is the traditional version of Sabian symbols.

In my blog there is the whole chapter about the 360 degrees as translated in English by Gadbury.

margherita

Hello all,

I would like to tie in with Margherits`s post and cite Sahl from the Ben Dykes translation (Sahl, Introduction, ? 5.3, p. 16):

?So then if a planet observed [another] planet and it was struck by its light on its degree, then it is connected with it; and if it was not struck by its light, then it is ?traveling towards the connection? until it is connected; and if the planet were in the last of the sign, [and] it is not connected with anything, and if the next sign was struck by its light, then whichever planet was first in that light is connected with it, even if the planet [which] was in the sign it will not see it.?

Ben Dykes mentions in his footnote that Sahl allows out-of-sign conjunctions, but that he does not allow out-of-sign aspects.

And just to complement what Margherita already wrote about the end of the signs, here is what Sahl says about it (Sahl, The Fifty Judgments, Judgment 15, p. 54):

?If a planet were in the last degree of a sign, its strength has already receded from that sign, and its strength will be in the next sign [?]. Indeed if a planet were in the twenty-ninth degree (28?00` - 28?59`), the strength of the planet will be in the same sign. Because there are three degrees of every planet in which its virtue is spread out ? namely, the degree in which it is, and the degree which is behind it, and the degree which is in front of it.?

On the other hand my question which I asked some time before in another thread is still not fully answered. When a planet is in the 3th house and 5? before the cusp of the 4th house one can consider that as a kind of conjunction with the 4th cusp (like Tom said) and the planet is said to have an effect to the 4th house. Now, the most common opinion is (as far as I know) that this planet works in both houses but with the emphasis on the 4th house ? and some say that it fully pertains to the 4th.

And there was my question: according to the secondary motion through the signs this planet moves toward the 4th house. But according to his primary motion from east to west it has already left the 4th house and moves deeper into the 3th.

But when the primary motion of the Sun was so important for the development of the houses, why do we not stick with it when it comes to the delineation of the planets in the houses. Because when we adhere to this common use of the 5? rule with respect to house-delineation we favor the secondary motion over the primary motion.
I would not have a problem to accept this ? I`d just like to know why.

I think you will find in a court of law that if the tip of your finger went over the boundary of the property it would be argued you had entered the others domain,

The question in front of us is where that boundary is, not whether or not it exists.