Time lords: how a Hellenistic astrologer divides a life

Hellenistic astrology is about events. It asks what will happen to the native rather than what the native is like — the Greek term, apotelesmatika, means something close to "outcomes". This changes the order in which a chart is read, and the change is more radical than it first appears.

The whole life before any part of it

It is easy to be impressed by an analysis of a famous person's chart when the outcome is already known. The technique only shows its quality on a chart read blind, or on a young person who has not yet done anything. Hellenistic practice guards against this by treating the entire life as a single event first, and assigning it a general quality, before any particular year is examined.

That general quality comes from the sect light — the Sun by day, the Moon by night — and from its trigon lords, the three rulers of the triplicity the light occupies, taken in the diurnal or nocturnal order.

Valens assesses them by a short list of conditions: whether each is at a pivot, in a post-ascension or in a declining place; whether it is rising or setting; whether it is in its own signs; and whether benefics or malefics witness it. The two main authors weight this differently — Valens leans on sect, Dorotheus on the house — and the disagreement is worth knowing about, because charts exist where the two readings part company.

The first lord in the sequence governs the earlier part of the life, the second the later part, the third participates throughout. When the first is badly placed and the second is well placed, Valens is blunt about what to expect: unsteady early years, then activity, but a life lived without stability.

When does the first part end?

The handover is not at a fixed age. It is calculated from the ascensional times of the sign the relevant lord occupies, at the latitude of birth. This is a real calculation with a real answer, and it is one of the places where Hellenistic practice is more specific than what replaced it.

It is also where the method earns its keep. A life that divides into a difficult first half and a supported second half, with a datable hinge between them, is a claim that can be checked — and, if the dates are wrong, refuted.

The divisions of the times

Below the level of the whole life sit the circumambulations: the Hellenistic ancestor of primary directions, and not quite the same thing as the medieval method that grew out of them.

A prorogated point is carried forward through the bounds, one degree of ascension to one year of life, at the birth latitude. The planet ruling the bound it currently occupies becomes the lord of that stretch of time, and colours whatever the prorogated point signifies. The Ascendant, prorogated, governs the body, travel and changes of residence; another point governs another department of life.

The periods that result are long — often several years — and their beginnings and ends are exact. Abu Ma'shar adds an observation that repays attention: the handover from one bound lord to the next is the most intense moment of the outgoing lord's governance. Things tend to happen at the seams.

The year

Within the long divisions, the annual profection names the lord of a single year. The Ascendant advances one sign per year of life; the ruler of the sign it reaches is the year's lord, and the whole year is read through that planet.

A profection that returns to an angle of the nativity — and especially to the rising sign itself, which happens every twelfth year — always marks a significant period. The year lord is then checked three ways: in the nativity, in the solar revolution for that year, and by transit. Dorotheus adds a rule of thumb that is easy to apply and surprisingly reliable: a year lord in the western half of the sky indicates misfortune.

Why the layering matters

The layers are not alternatives. A Hellenistic judgement works down through them: the fortune of the whole life, then the division of the times, then the year, then the transits of the day. A transit means almost nothing on its own; it means a great deal when it falls on a planet that the year has already activated and that a long division has already put under strain.

This is the opposite of the modern habit of reading transits first and asking what they are aspecting afterwards. It is slower, it requires more calculation, and it produces statements specific enough to be wrong — which is the whole point.

The scheme is set out in Valens's Anthology, in Dorotheus, in Paulus Alexandrinus and in Hephaistio, all of which now exist in English. Our predictive seminars work through it on charts where the outcome is documented, because that is the only setting in which the method can be honestly tested.