Temperament and the marks of a violent death

Two subjects that a modern reading usually leaves out sit near the centre of traditional practice: the temperament of the native, and the manner of death. The first is a diagnostic tool. The second is the point at which the tradition's confidence and a practitioner's discretion come into open conflict.

Temperament

Temperament is the native's physical and psychological baseline — the constitution on which everything else in the chart plays. It is calculated, not impressionistically judged, from a weighted set of testimonies: the sign and phase of the Moon, the sign of the Ascendant and its lord, the season, and the planets close to the angles.

The result is a mixture rather than a type. A chart that comes out melancholic with a strong choleric secondary describes someone quite different from a plain melancholic: the shared quality is dryness, and dryness doubled gives a hardness and a persistence that neither humour produces alone.

The refinement that matters most is distemper. A temperament can be present in its balanced form or pushed out of balance by affliction. A melancholic constitution reinforced by a Moon–Saturn conjunction is not simply more melancholic; it acquires a depressive cast. A choleric significator that is combust and squared by Mars is not more energetic but more brittle — capable of long withdrawal broken by sudden impatience.

None of this predicts behaviour. It describes the material the native is working with, which is a far more defensible claim and, in a consultation, a more useful one.

Vocation

The traditional significator of vocation is usually Mercury, read with its dispositor and with whatever planet is strongest at the relevant angle. A Mercury in hard aspect to Mars, with Mars in a place of its joy, points towards work that involves discipline, risk or arms — and the testimony strengthens considerably if the same planets also rule the Ascendant and the Midheaven, so that the person and the career draw on one significator.

Fixed stars contribute here as well. A star of the nature of Mars on the Midheaven is a small testimony on its own and a decisive one when it repeats what the planets already say.

The marks of a violent death

The older authors treat this as an ordinary technical question, and Lilly gives the fullest English account. The testimonies that count are:

• the lord of the Ascendant afflicted by the lord of the eighth house;
• the significators of death placed in the violent signs — Aries, Libra, Scorpio, Capricorn, Aquarius;
• the afflicting planet in a human sign, which points to death at the hands of men rather than by accident or illness;
• both lights afflicted by the malefics, which raises the whole question to the level of the life rather than an episode within it.

A chart in which all four coincide is genuinely rare, and the tradition treats the combination as conclusive. A chart with one of them is saying very little.

When the testimonies are activated

A natal configuration is a capacity, not an appointment. Three techniques bring it into a particular period:

• Directions, which carry the Ascendant to a natal degree or to an antiscion — a directed Ascendant reaching the antiscion of a natal Moon–Saturn conjunction activates whatever that conjunction signified;
• Firdaria, which hand the period to a planet and its participant, so that the significations of that planet in that chart become the material of those years;
• The solar revolution, which is where the natal indication becomes concrete or does not.

A revolution that gathers the natal significators of enemies and death on its own Ascendant, in a sign that corresponds to an angle of the nativity, is saying something specific: the danger arrives, it arrives through people, and it will be public.

A necessary caution

These techniques are studied on documented historical charts for a reason. The judgement of death is the one place where traditional astrology is most confident and where a practitioner should be least willing to speak.

The testimonies describe a class of danger, not a date and not a certainty; the historical record is full of charts carrying every mark of a violent end whose owners died in bed. And a client who is told such a thing cannot unhear it. Our position is the conventional one among traditional practitioners, and we hold it firmly: this material is for study, and for understanding what the sources actually claim. It is not for the consulting room.

The calculation of temperament is treated in detail in the first two issues of the Tradition; the delineation of violent death is in Lilly's Christian Astrology, chapter CLVI.