The quarterly ingresses: reading a season
The Aries ingress opens the year for a place. The three that follow — Cancer, Libra, Capricorn — subdivide it, each governing its own quarter and each read against the annual chart rather than on its own.
What a quarterly chart adds
The annual chart shows the conditions. The quarter shows where in the year a given condition becomes active, and through what.
A difficulty indicated in the Aries chart usually announces its timing by which quarter repeats it: the same planet angular again, the same house afflicted again, the same lord dignified or debilitated again. A quarter that does not repeat the annual testimony is comparatively quiet, whatever else it contains.
Reading one
The method is the same as for the annual chart, cast for the same place:
- the Ascendant and its lord for the country and its people;
- the tenth and its lord for the government;
- whatever is angular, dignified or not — angularity is what makes a planet act;
- the Moon for the common people and, through her applications, for the sequence of events;
- the lord of the quarter, weighed against the lord of the year.
The rule about precedence
The authorities give a rule that is easy to skip and changes the judgement: where the lunation preceding an ingress is a new moon, the ingress chart governs; where it is a full moon, the lunation chart takes precedence for that period. There are variants, and they are worth knowing before rather than after.
Cancer in particular
The Cancer ingress carries the solstice, and the older mundane authors give the solstitial ingresses somewhat more weight than the equinoctial quarters other than Aries. In the northern hemisphere it also governs the harvest quarter, which is why so much of the surviving mundane literature about it concerns crops, prices and scarcity — the questions patrons actually paid for.