Judging a public scandal: derived houses and the discipline of not naming
Political scandals attract astrological commentary, and most of it is indefensible: a chart for a living person, cast from an uncertain time, read to support a conclusion the author already held about their guilt.
The technique can do something more modest and more interesting. It can describe the shape of a public affair — where it originated, whether it stays concealed, how long it runs — without asserting anything about an individual. Here is how that judgement is built.
Choose the chart before choosing the answer
For a public affair there are three legitimate options, and the choice must be made before the judgement:
- The ingress for the capital, if the question is about the country's year;
- The inauguration chart of the government, if the question is about an administration;
- An event chart for the moment the matter became public, if the question is about the affair itself.
Taking whichever of the three best supports a view one already holds is the failure mode, and it is common.
Derived houses
Mundane work depends on derivation, and it repays being explicit. In a national chart the tenth is the government. The twelfth from the tenth — the ninth radical — carries what works against the government out of sight. The second from the tenth is public money; the eighth from the tenth, the money of others and what is owed. The seventh from the tenth is open opposition.
A significator of concealment placed on an angle is the standard signature of a concealed matter becoming visible. The lord of a house of money afflicted by a malefic in a house of secrecy describes a financial matter that has been kept quiet. Neither says who did what.
Duration
The traditional measures of duration are worth more than the dramatic ones. Angular significators describe a matter that will not go away; cadent, one that fades. A significator in a fixed sign draws the affair out; in a cardinal sign it breaks quickly; in a mutable sign it recurs in altered form.
The Moon's next applications give the sequence of what happens next, and the number of degrees to each contact gives a rough measure of when — a genuinely predictive statement, and one that can be checked against the record.
Why we do not name
A birth time for a public figure is almost always unverified, and a rectified time can be adjusted until it agrees with whatever the astrologer expects. That alone should give pause.
The stronger objection is different. A person who has not asked for a reading has not consented to one, and a published chart judgement about their honesty is an accusation dressed in technical vocabulary. It cannot be answered on its own terms, because its terms are not shared.
Our position, which is the conventional one in the traditional field: mundane astrology addresses offices, events and countries. It does not diagnose named living individuals in public, whatever the charts appear to show.
This is also, incidentally, the better astrology. A judgement of an event chart can be recorded in advance and checked afterwards. A judgement of someone's character cannot be checked at all, which is exactly why it is so often made.
Mundane method is treated at length in the Tradition.