Charting the House Systems

I have read a lot about each house system. There are time-based systems like the Koch and Placidus house systems — the first and second most popular house systems in the U.S.A.

Read more: Charting the House Systems

Space versus Time versus Meridians

The flaw to the time-based systems is they cannot deal with extremely northern latitudes: the northern United Kingdom, Scandinavian, upper Russia and norther Mongolia. That may not be a problem for astrologers just doing friends and family in a specific region but for us at Sabian. Earth where we chart people and events all over the globe it is a hindrance.

But there are also space-based systems like the Regiomontanus and Campanus– the latter the most popular European house system.

Finally, there are house systems that divide the ecliptic either on the meridian or the equator both imaginary astronomical lines that are used regularly for plotting the transits of the Sun.

 Sabian.Earth uses a meridian based system called Morinus after the French scientist who theorized it.

Monsieur Jean Baptiste Morin did not use the system he proposed. but wrote about this alternate system to fix many irregularities he found with other prevailing house systems. Instead, Morin used fellow mathematician Johannes Müller von Königsberg’s house system called via the Latinized version of his name: Regiomontanus.

A meridian based system uses the celestial equator as its basis and then divides it into twelve equal-sized segments starting from the Meridian, an imaginary great circle that passes through the celestial poles, zenith, and nadir of a particular location.

It has the impressive ability of making charts with few interceptions all over the mundane world. Because it is Meridian based, the is not at top of the chart at the beginning of tenth house nor ascendant at the start of the first. So both points are free floating and depend upon the chart’s location how far away they may fall from the “standard” reference.

Another house system that uses the meridian for its calculations is the Meridian house system; stock trader- astrologer Bill Meridian uses that one.

So with all that against the Meridian, why use it?

The major reason is the lack of interceptions, or should we say “forced interceptions” in northern climes like London where getting a double set of interceptions is not uncommon. Those who use the Placidus house system are all for that and see no problem. Maybe, but neither do we think it gives any advantage.

C.E.O. Carter often used the Campanus to avoid double interceptions. Irishman Cyril Fagan insisted on that and taught his student, Frenchman Dane Rudyhar to use it as well and former AFA head, Australian Bernadette Brady uses it too. . Now it is the major European house system. Alan Leo of course did not.

So that is the major reason for the Morinus house system: extra interceptions.

The second reason is “precession of the equinoxes.”

What is the precession of the equinoxes ?

Precession of the equinoxes is the slow, cyclical movement of Earth’s rotational axis over approximately 26,000 years. This movement causes the celestial poles to trace out circles in the sky and alters the position of the equinoxes along the ecliptic. Therefore, the equinox dates are not the same every year — precession changes them, so sometimes the Vernal Equinox is the 19th, sometimes the 20th and sometimes as late as the 21st.¹

Also because of precession the tropical calendar is twenty minutes faster than the sidereal one and Vedic astrologers use an ayanamsa to offset it.

Now, after all that chatter, does the house system matter at all?

When we started Sabian.Earth whether a house system mattered was a major discussion. We read about the various types and then since software takes away mapping this out by hand; we tried them against our own and many other known charts.

      It all started with Porphyry

The Porphyry House system dates from the 3rd Century AD and is named after its creator, Porphyry (233-305 AD)  a neo-Platonist and student of Plotinus.  He devised his system from the writings of Greek astrologer named Orion (150-175 AD) before Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos was written in 295 AD.  It is the oldest house system and uses Equal Houses like the Ancient Egyptians, but the Midheaven is always the Tenth House Cusp and the remaining houses are determined by trisecting each hemisphere and works with Northern Arctic locations.

Despite that, many in the Artic Circle, Scandinavia and Russia primarily though Northern Scotland also fall into that category, for example, do not use it because it is too “fixed” and does not consider the ecliptic. That does not concern astrologer who has an odd chart or two in the Artic Circle, but if that is your meat and potatoes then it is problematic and some astrologers abandoned the craft altogether because getting the right “house” method of software was impossible. ¹ One woman working with infant deaths mentioned this as her reason for leaving Astrology in the British Astrological Association archives. Indeed, a sad loss.

The NeoPorphyry, a modern update to the ancient version, has little in common with its namesake, — it would seem the name is just a marketing gimmick for those who think that they are getting a “correct” Porphyry.  The major difference between the two, is that the Neo  no longer trisects each quadrant equally but now uses a graduated “sinusoidal” method  (i.e. based on the sine wave) so that everything is still apparently smooth but houses with lots of planets get more space while those with few or no planets get less. It is easy to view and for those into financial forecasting because of its similarity to Welles Wilder’s Stochastic Trend System, easy to follow.

But the true earliest known house system is the Whole House System where the houses basically disappear and each house equals a sign.  It does not tie the Ascendant to the first house, though the chart starts with the ascendant zodiac sign & the ascendant itself lies at the correct degree within it.    The Hellenistic Astrologers use this method and has no interceptions.

                             Alcabitius liked Ptolemy

Alcabitius is “time-based” system i.e. it is based on the diurnal (sun day) arc of the ascendant.  A Syrian Christian c. 950 AD, he wrote a book on astrology and created his House System to replicate the  Ptolemaic one as stated in the Tetrabiblos; it does not have interceptions but has unequal houses (i.e. each house cusp has its own start. In the true Equal House system, all houses are exactly the same size & have the same start, see the slideshow for more).  What is nice about Alcabitius is that it causes no distortion at high latitudes so people born in Russia, Scotland etc. can use this method without getting wide distortions — though some actually like that.  See Mary Ann Trump for examples.  The NeoProphyry house system fixes that.

Michel de Nostradame (Nostradamus)  used the Alcabitius System for his predictions, probably because he was originally a Sephardic Jew prior to his Catholic conversion.

               Alcabitus is out…the Latins move in

The Campanus House System was created by two Italian mathematician brothers, Johannes and Matthias Campanus, born around 1250 AD, and is “space based” a term that refers to when a House System uses the prime vertical — the great circle that passes through the east and west points of the horizon and the zenith (midheaven) and nadir at right angles.  The prime vertical starts in Greenwich England, and is what all longitudes are based upon.  See this set of Naval cartoons — they are a set of three — for greater clarification.

While the Campanus  brothers based their method on the Alcabitius House Method, they made significant changes, including being the  first to incorporate the idea of Intercepted Houses.  A problem with Campanus (and its successor Regiomontanus and Placidus) is that half of the system (zenith to nadir) is equatorial and the other half (east to west) is ecliptic based. They also broke with Alcabitius that the cusp should mark the center of a house rather than its start.  Campanus  is still rather popular in Europe today  (thanks to French-American Dane Rudhyar who studied under the Irish Cyril Fagan).

                                                 Regiomontanus changes that

Next up was the German Regiomontanus (aka Johann Müller), a contemporary supporter of Reverend Martin Luther.  According to Dr. Luke Broughton Regiomontanus made his name by selling an “Ephemerides” much like Raphael & Neil Morrison would do several hundred years later.   He brought this work out for astrological purposes, containing the planets, longitudes, aspects, etc.’, for thirty years,  and each year sold out for  twelve Hungarian pieces of gold.

After making a name for him, Regiomontanus then announced a new house system that was as a further improvement on the Campani Bros. by changing the cusps from the middle of the house back to the start and making them fixed.  He felt that they should be immovable because they were space-based (like the Campanus ) and not (birth) time or (birth) place based (like Alcabitius); We typically use it in horary work because of William Lilly.

                        Brother Placidus enters the Fray

Benedictine monk Placidus de Titis (1590-1668) was also a mathematician.  He read Ptolemy in the original and was considered the authority on the latter’s work.  Placidus was a native of Bologna, and mathematician to the Archduke Leopold  William of Austria.   His work was considered the most accurate rendering of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblios until Morinus entered the fray with a “time based” system that tri-sections the arcs.  He calculated the time it would take any degree to ascend from the ecliptic  to the Midheaven and then from the ecliptic to the nadir.

Mathematically, Placidus’s method was rather complicated, astronomically, according to Carl Tobey “this was just as bad,”  as his predecessors, and ultimately no different because it made  unequally divided houses or a different start point  for each house depending on location.The last point is problematic for anyone born north of Cornwall, England, where large intercepted houses occur at the midheaven — see Mrs. Frank Trump’s chart for an example of this.

Raphael (Robert Cross) based his ephemeris on Placidus, probably because it was  not French, and  all the major astrologers followed suit i.e., Charubel, Alan Leo, Charles E. O. Carter and Marc Edmund Jones because they used his tables. It is still the most popular one around, though in America the German Walter Koch system is a close second, though the latter system does not address all the problems of Placidus.  It is doubtful though that the Britishers Raphael and Alan Leo would have used a French system no matter how accurate because of  historical prejudices,

                                  Placidus is wrong!?

The French medical doctor, Jean-Baptiste Morin, better known as Morinus, fixed Placidus’s  mathematical errors based on a manuscript he got from a fellow Scottish doctor who knew of his interest.  While Morin was born seven years after Jerome Cardano had died, his most pioneering work was in similar areas to the earlier astrologer.  As Morin was Kepler’s contemporary and correspondent, he was the first to design a longitudinal system, but was vilified by the powerful Cardinal Richelieu & Etienne Pascal, so he was work was banned and his theories thrown out.  Whether this affected Benjamin Harrison’s Longitude is a good speculation, but biographer Dava Sobel never addresses that issue.  While the Morinus method is mathematically accurate, the houses are still uneven slightly but can be used at all latitudes.

The Australian David Cope (Zariel)  re-discovered Morinus’s work and corrected cuspal issues for his Meridian House System.  This means that some planets now fall in the previous  or latter house but our highlighted chart for Wendell Willkie does not show that discrepancy.  The one below, for the founding of Helena, Montana does.  Green is the earlier Morinus method; gold, the later Zariel.  Look at the midheaven for the most obvious difference:  Morinus has 06.10 Aquarius; Zariel’s (as it called in Janus 5) 01.36 Aquarius.  After that, look at the where the part of fortune falls in each globe: Morinus it is in the 2nd, Zariel the 1st and of course on the other side of the hemisphere Venus falls into the seventh house for Meridian.

Technology and the 20th Century

Sydney Omarr was good friends with fellow astrologer & astronomer Carl Payne Tobey (see here for his picture and wedding announcement).  In Omarr’s  autobiography, My world of Astrology,¹  Tobey discusses the key to their choice of the equal house system was  based on the ecliptic North Pole.

So what is the ecliptic North Pole?

It is a mathematical point that is 90º north of the artic circle that is often seen on globes as where all the latitudes converge.

The distance from the Artic Circle to the regular North Pole is exactly the same as the distance of the Tropic of Cancer from the equator  and the Tropic of Capricorn to the Antartica Circle.  All of this also explains  why on the horoscope bottom is North, top south and the left is East and the right is West.   So why do they feel that’s important?

1. It divides the horizon into twelve equal sections and has the great circle passing through he zenith and nadir just like it would in the sky.
2. The cusp of the first house will not be the ascendant because that comes after the house division and should not influence it.

It does have a relationship to the Campanus system, so a Table of Houses created for that house can be used by the Zenith or Equal House system.  Lois Rodden was another who preferred the Equal system.  The Whole House system starts at Zero not at the ascendant like the Equal and is used when “no houses” are preferred, like when the birth time is unknown.  This system can be easily transferred to the Witte 90 degree dial. Kelly Surtees uses this one.

                                      Going back in time

In the meantime, our reference chart of President Bill Clinton is problematic as it does not have interceptions no matter which house system we try.  We want to highlight interceptions. First Marc Edmund Jones used them but many other modern astrologers do too (Martha Lang Wescott’s Mechanics of the Future and her audio on Anne Sexton drives home what she feels is the importance of an interception. )  So, we are  changing our reference point from the Democrat Bill Clinton to the 1940 Republican Nominee Wendell Willkie who lost against incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 Presidential election..

If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Wilkie, read his obituary from the New York Times where they hailed him as “businessman who put politics aside” and ran for office.  Boy, has that tune changed 75 years later.  N Y Times — Wilkie dies.

                                                          Pictures please

Now that with all of that under your belt, click on the Slideshow to see  how the various house systems handle the same horoscope. I tried to put the slides in chronological order.  The key things to notice is the early cusp layout that affects Mars in Sagittarius.   If the keyword ASC for Ascendant is not noted, then it  is the start of the first house.

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Footnotes:

1. Omarr, Sydney.  My World of Astrology, 1969 edition.  Published by:  Wilshire Book Company, 8721 Sunset Blvd. Hollywood CA 90069.
2. Another Equal House system was created by  the Dutch esoterist A. E. Thierens.  He  has a rather unusual tarot system that is worth reviewing.
3. The Meridian System is available in the cheap Matrix WinStar series that Michael Erlewine sold to his ex-employee, David Cochrane. He and his wife Fei do not maintain the Matrix line but use it as a starting point for their own set of software: — Pegasus, Kepler and Sirius. Pegasus being their entry line software.
4. Kepler is what I primarily use as I traded up from WinStar. It has the major house systems and one or two arcane ones.
5. Their top of line is Sirius. It is very expensive, and it is best to review the line of features to make sure you need it.You can buy one and trade up as needed, but you do not get the full price as a trade-in — because I guess software depreciates.
6. Solar Fire is from Australia. Many prefer it because of the large variety of information it provides that Kepler does not and is just $50.00 more. 
   • Its Uranian portion is fine.
7. The Church of Light, with its own metaphysical course system, also sells an astrology charting system. It only has two house systems, Placidus and Porphyry and their own Zain-based Cosmobiology system.
8. Janus 6 is from New Zealand. It also has a basic and professional line. .  It’s Uranian portion is superb, but it has a very limited database.  It is no longer the bargain Janus 5 was, and 6 has a lot of changes I do not like.
   • Also it not available for Macs.
9. Aureas hails from Paris.  One version is for beginners and the other is for professionals. It comes with the complete Michel Gauquelin database, which may be interest to those following that system or interested in his work.
   • It is very French specific with arrondissements and departments. If you are French-based or doing a lot of French specific charts, Aureas is the one to get.
   • Another helpful feature is its Uranian portion is also very good.  Naturally it is tailored it to an European audience.
10. Finally, there is the free Astrolog.  It has lots of houses but its graphics are gif-y.  
    • Others in that category are Morinus  and Zet. Gavin McClung of the Hyperion Symbols uses Astrolog and recommends it.
11. Hourihane Software based in Los Angeles does not have the Meridian and is overall not competitive with any of the paid software mentioned here.

1. Last time the Vernal Equinox was March 21st was 2007. This is o uncommon that the next time we will have a Vernal Equinox that late is 2101. ↩︎

Footnotes:

• 1
  One woman working with infant deaths mentioned this as her reason for leaving Astrology in the British Astrological Association archives. Indeed, a sad loss. ↩︎