rectification technique - the trutine of hermes

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this is a rectification concept that is discussed briefly in ben dykes translation of abu bakr - volume 2 persian nativities.. he describes this technique in the very back on this book. abu bakr discusses it at 1.4.1 earlier in the book..

one takes the moon and ascendant in the natal chart and reverse their position in a chart for approx 9 months previous to arrive at a conception chart. that is the theory...

i am wondering if anyone has tried this technique with their own or other charts?

i tried it on my own chart and it is fairly close, but when i try it on the royal baby georges chart i can't get it to work.. the place of birth and conception remains the same in the literature ben dykes gives as an example.. if anyone wants to try on baby george - oct 17 2012 is the date i am working with as a conception date.

Rectification technique - the Trutine of Hermes

2
James:

I have used the adapted form of the Trutine of Hermes described in Bailey's 'Pre-Natal Epoch.'

I tried it out on someone with a timed birth. They gave me a half hour window and I attempted to work out the birth time. I succeeded - that is to say, I was two minutes out. Then I tried it with a pair of twins, knowing both birth times. They were born, according to their birth certificates, 6 minutes apart. This time I was one minute out for both births - but the time difference remained 6 minutes. One might postulate that the timepiece used was one minute slow.

I have not attempted to calculate the pre-natal epoch for Prince George.

Melissa

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melissa

i thought this concept might have been used by alice bailey but it has been eon's since i read her work on the pre-natal epoch. thanks for letting me know this. thanks for your feedback of the use of this idea for rectification based on your limited use of it. my birth time was about 7 minutes out if this theory is correct. i think the reason i was curious of the accuracy of the royal babies chart is that it is considered a fairly accurate birth time! i am unable to re-create a conception chart for him using this theory, but i do note that the moon's nodal axis is on the spot of his natal ascendant in the area of time i offered in my initial post.. that wouldn't have been factored into this theory as i know it, but it is an interesting observation on the conception chart that i am trying to get for him! my interest is mostly to do with seeing if it has any value as a rectification tool. thanks for your comments! james

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thanks for pointing out this thread from 8 years ago mark! i see the conversation spans 4 pages and 6 1/2 years! very interesting comments from a number of posters.

it appears lilly's approach is more nuanced then the information given in persian nativities volume 2.. lilly mentions the animodar method which is not mentioned in relation to trutine of hermes in dykes translation book 2. i have spliced and diced debs comments. anyone interested in the context can follow marks link for the full text and comments deb makes. many interesting comments on the thread that mark posts which go beyond the topic of trutine of hermes.. they are a worthwhile read for anyone interested in rectification techniques..
Deb wrote:Lilly?s instruction on p.502 , for the Trutine of Hermes, is to first of all calculate the angles and the Moon?s position for the time given:

If the Moon is above the earth you subtract the absolute longitude of the descendant from that of the Moon; if it?s below you subtract the ascendant from the Moon instead. Yours is above so we use the descendant.
Deb wrote:Animodar Method

Thinking about this as I was working through your example made me totally convinced there is no real merit in it.
Deb wrote: Lilly stressed that he was only explaining these methods because they were taken seriously by other, very knowledgeable astrologers. He maintained that the only reliable way to rectify a nativity was by looking for correspondence between directions and known events and it was standard convention for astrologers of his time to begin a chart judgement with an explanation of how the chart had been verified and proved this way (ie., through 'accidents' directions and relation to 'revolutions').

But he does say that some astrologers swore by the results this ancient method produced. Either way it?s been a productive exercise for me to explore it a little more deeply than I have before. I think we can learn a lot from the techniques of the past ? even the dud ones if they illuminate what an astrologer was doing in a chart, and why.
full quote from papretis below.. she makes numerous comments before she makes this comment though..
Papretis wrote:Oh my Lord, I don't know where I had got the 11.00 time for me by Trutina Hermetis, I calculated it again and got either 10.34 (earlier time) or 11.45 (later time).

But what I've been thinking about this method is, that it means that there are only certain moments during the day when people can be born. Any midwife can tell us that this is not true in real life. So, if we use Trutina Hermetis, we must take it as a metaphysical time of birth, not the actual physical one. It would also mean that souls would be kind of "pulsating" into the world in groups. Anyone born in the same day and same place than I between 10.34 and 11.45 o'clock have exactly the same horoscope when rectified (backwards) with Trutina Hermetis. And what about those who have been born prematurely...? But I?m not denying that it might still be an interesting idea.
Last edited by james_m on Mon Aug 05, 2013 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Hello james_m,

I calculated for the Royal baby a/t the trutine of Hermes and I also get Oct 17 2012 as the date of conception.

Conception = 17 Oct 2012, 10:23 pm (UT)
Rectified birth = 22 Jul 2013, 4:33 pm BST (instead of 4:24 pm).
Yes, I know! This is probably not aceptable because it is after the reported time of birth!
Last edited by astrojin on Wed Aug 07, 2013 4:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Assumptions

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Good morning,

All of the methods of astrological birth time rectification i have seen to date are excellent examples of what is called 'circular reasoning'. Calculations are made according to a set of assumptions. The results are integrated into the framework of the same set of assumptions. The assumptions are considered axioms.

One can see how this works when an astrologer changes or recalibrates some of her tools. New rectified times result that are, once again, plugged into the new set of assumptions.

Very few astrologers - including those attempting to apply statistical methods - question for example the basic attributes assigned to the seven geocentrically visible planets in, say, Hellenistic astrology. Mythology, that varied even from Babylonian to Hellenistic times, is mostly mingled with observations. Indian astrology assigned somewhat other attributes of beneficence and maleficence than Hellenistic astrology. More 'scientific' authors attempted to deduce such attributes from the apparent colours, brightnesses and motions of the planets, employing analogies to common human behaviour and to other terrestrial phenomena.

Is the Moon, used in the scales of Hermes rectification method, active-masculine (Babylon, Semitic and Germanic languages) or passive-feminine (Greece, Rome)? Is it beneficent, maleficent or at times (waxing) the prior, at other times (waning) the latter? What research, if any, demonstrates or negates the validity of any of all of these notions?

Best regards,

lihin
Non esse nihil non est.

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thanks astrojin!

i thought it would be interesting to try applying the theory to the royal babies chart as one would suspect the time is fairly accurate..

i was able to replicate your work with the royal baby, but would like to point out to others that the ascendant is reversed from the place of the moon. georges natal moon is at 28 capricorn 17.. the conception ascendant for 10:23pm ut will give one 28 cancer 17 ascendant. as astrojin points out, in order to get this data one has to alter the birth time by 8 minutes..

i believe that flipping the ascendant around like that makes sense and something i may be remembering from alice baileys presentation of this concept, but the 8 minutes out doesn't make as much sense to me.

lihin,

i agree there is a lot of circular logic to astrology. this old idea was something i was curious to know if others had tried using. i am glad i brought it up.. astrologers need to try techniques out to see if they have any merit or not.. what do you do with birth times you are not sure about? have you tried doing any rectification? ordinarily one takes a number of events in a persons life and attempts to line them up in such a way that they fit a 'tentative' chart. it is quite a tricky business actually.

isaac starkman has an astrology program called polaris that one can buy for 3 or 4 hundred $ that claims to be able to rectify a persons chart. i don't own it, but i think computers could be helpful in this task. his astro program also has the pre-natal epoch as an important component of the software.. alice bailey might have been the first one to re-introduce this idea and i do recall reading some or all of a book on the pre-natal epoch by her, but i don't recall any of it sticking. it is interesting to read about this method again in ben dykes persian nativities book 2...

Rectification programmes

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Good evening,

There are several astrological rectification computer programmes that apply various methods, often with a choice, some of them much less costly than the one mentioned. All are based on one or more sets of not yet validated assumptions.

With a frequent key of 1 degree of right ascension equals 1 solar (tropical or sidereal?) year, rectification using primary directions is extremely time sensitive. One can read series of rectifications to one second of time and arc, ex. gr. in the books of Dr H, Regulus Astrology. However, he emphasised that he used not only PDs but other methods as well including solar arcs to arrive at such rectifications.

Of course everyone is welcome to try whatever one likes. Without underlying assumptions validated to a high degree of probability, however, techniques like rectification seem to resemble elaborate rooms in complex air castles.

Best regards,

lihin
Non esse nihil non est.

11
thanks for the feedback on the rectification process lihin and astrojin,

my intuition tells me much the same thing.. if one thinks about rectification programs like polaris that rely on the prenatal epoch as a part of their means of rectification, then one can draw whatever conclusion they would like on this.. regardless, i am in the same position before i started this exercise with an additional understanding of this particular technique for rectification! perhaps in times long past where getting accurate time was very difficult, it made a certain amount of sense.

in looking at some of the history on rectification, i still believe much the same approach as outlined by the deb quote below needs to be taken today - in the absence of a known birth time. in spite of the hazards of rectification, i see the necessity of examining events and their correspondence to these same predictive tools astrologers use in the absence of a known birth time.. on the other hand i have noticed how for as many astrologers as their are, there are usually just as many 'rectified' charts!

in my overview on tiger woods chart in the general section it would make more sense to me that the primary direction of saturn, or the ascendant to saturn would coincide with the time frame fall 2009 - spring 2010, as opposed to this year.. perhaps the birth time for tiger woods is out slightly, or the options i am taking for primary directions aren't perfect. using a solar return for woods for 2009 and 2010 is very informative, especially if one includes the outer planets although that might not be necessary either.

astrojin it was fascinating to read what you had to say on solar returns on the other thread which i have yet to comment on! thanks again for those comments!

Deb wrote: He ( Lilly) maintained that the only reliable way to rectify a nativity was by looking for correspondence between directions and known events and it was standard convention for astrologers of his time to begin a chart judgement with an explanation of how the chart had been verified and proved this way (ie., through 'accidents' directions and relation to 'revolutions').

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Also, in any discussion of the Trutine of Hermes, it should be noted that in very many well-timed births, it's not even POSSIBLE for the requirements of the Trutine of Hermes to be fulfilled.

Since it can be shown to be impossible in many particular individual cases, it casts deep doubts as a method in the general case.

Take care

James