The Aries ingress: how the astrological year is judged
The astrological year begins at the Sun's entry into Aries, and the chart of that moment is the foundation of mundane judgement for the twelve months that follow. Two features of it are constantly misunderstood.
It is cast for a place
The ingress happens at one instant for the whole world, but the chart is cast for a location, and the angles differ. Lisbon, Berlin and Buenos Aires receive three different charts from the same moment, with different rising signs, different house placements and different judgements.
There is therefore no such thing as "the chart for the year". There is a chart for the year here. Any published ingress judgement that does not name its location has skipped the first step.
It is not a forecast of events
The ingress describes conditions: the state of the country, the standing of its government, its resources, its relations with others, what presses on it from outside. Particular events are shown by the charts that fall within the year — lunations, eclipses, the quarterly ingresses — read against the ingress as background.
The relationship is like a nativity and its solar revolution. The ingress is the ground; the year's smaller charts are what happens on it.
How the judgement is built
- The Ascendant and its lord — the condition of the country and its people.
- The tenth and its lord — the government, its authority, its stability.
- The lord of the year — the planet with most dignity over the significant places, which colours the whole period.
- The angular planets — whatever is angular acts, whether or not it is dignified. An angular malefic is the single most reliable indication of a difficult year.
- The Moon — the common people, and the immediate sequence of events through her applications.
Where the ingress falls near the boundary of a season, or where the lunation preceding it is a new moon rather than a full one, the authorities give additional rules about which chart takes precedence. These are not ornamental: they change which chart governs.
The quarters
The ingresses into Cancer, Libra and Capricorn are read as subdivisions, each for its own three months, and each against the Aries chart. A difficulty indicated in the annual chart usually shows where in the year it falls by which quarter repeats it.
The one rule that keeps this honest
Write the judgement down, with dates, before the period begins.
An ingress read in March and published in March can be checked in December by anyone who kept the text. An ingress interpreted in December to explain what already happened is not astrology; it is editing. The tradition's mundane authors were writing for patrons who expected the first kind, and that expectation is what kept the technique disciplined.
Ingress work, with judgements recorded in advance, appears in the Tradition.