Lilly on his own nativity: a practitioner reading himself
Among the worked examples in Christian Astrology, the most instructive is the one readers most often skip: Lilly's judgement of his own nativity.
It is unusual for three reasons.
He applies his own rules to himself
A textbook author demonstrating a method on a stranger's chart can choose the example. On his own, Lilly has to take what the chart gives, including the parts that do not flatter him. The judgement is recognisably the same method he sets out elsewhere in the book — which is not always true of authors and their examples.
It can be checked against a life
Lilly's biography is unusually well documented, much of it by himself. The judgement can therefore be read against a life we know: the early poverty, the marriages, the sudden rise, the position through the civil war, the accusations and the trials.
The value is not in confirming that the chart "works". It is in seeing which of his statements are specific enough to check at all, and how the ones that fail, fail.
He reads the difficulties
He does not present himself as fortunate. The chart's testimonies for hardship, for enemies, for the precariousness of his standing are stated rather than softened — and a practitioner reading himself has every reason to soften them. That restraint is the most professionally useful thing in the passage.
Reading it now
Two cautions. The nativity is not an unimpeachable one: Lilly discusses the birth time and there is a case for more than one reading of it. And an autobiographical judgement is written by someone who knows how the story went — which is a limitation on any self-reading, however honest.
Take it, then, as what it is: a demonstration of a whole method by its own author, on material he could not choose. Read alongside the medical and horary examples, it is the best evidence we have of how a seventeenth-century practitioner actually worked.
Christian Astrology, book three, is the standard English source for natal technique and is treated throughout our course.