Resources / Celestial instrument
Celestial Instrument
A bench for the chart: the live sky over a place, a chart cast for a birth or a beginning, the planetary hours, the sky at an episode's release and a review of electional gates.
A test module, open while it is built: the Sun, Moon, ascendant, midheaven, sect, lots and planetary hours are calculated for the place and moment you choose; Mercury through Saturn wait for a validated ephemeris and are left blank rather than guessed.
Preparing the instrument for your time and place
The tradition
Traditional astrology is less a matter of reading meanings off a list than of judging condition: where a planet sits, what it rules, what it sees, and whether the place strengthens or weakens it. The dignity schemes exist to make that judgement systematic.
The hermetic lots — the Part of Fortune the best known among them — are computed points rather than bodies, derived from arcs between the luminaries and the ascendant. They shift the chart's emphasis toward a particular question, which is why the older literature carries so many of them.
Reading the instrument
- The dignity panel reports each placed body's essential dignities by sign and face (domicile, exaltation, detriment, fall, and the face by decan) with Lilly's weights, so a planet's condition can be judged rather than assumed. Triplicity and terms are not yet reckoned.
- Lots are calculated points, and most reverse their formula between day and night charts — check which sect the chart is before reading them.
- The wheel turns the ascendant to the left and numbers the whole-sign houses from it, with the meridian through the midheaven; the ephemeris table gives the positions beneath. The chart is cast for the place as well as the time, so both must be right.
Where it descends from
- Hellenistic and Perso-Arabic astrology
- The dignity schemes and lots reach modern practice through this transmission rather than from a single author.
- Agrippa and the Latin tradition
- The route by which much of this material became available to European practitioners.
- William Lilly, Christian Astrology (1647)
- The table of essential dignities and the weights (+5 for domicile to −5 for detriment) the dignity panel uses.
What this does not claim
The Sun and Moon are computed from standard series (Meeus): over 1990–2060 the Sun agrees with a reference ephemeris to a few arcseconds and the Moon to about 15″. Mercury through Saturn need a planetary ephemeris the instrument does not yet have, and are shown without a position rather than with an invented one. It makes no predictive claim about events or persons.
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