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Campanus houses
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What it is
Campanus is a quadrant house system that divides space. Of all the systems it is the most literally geometric: it cuts the sphere of the sky around the birthplace into twelve equal segments, like the segments of an orange, and reads where each segment meets the zodiac.
As in every quadrant system, the four angles are the cusps of the angular houses: the Ascendant opens the 1st, the Imum Coeli the 4th, the Descendant the 7th and the Midheaven the 10th.
How it is worked out
The circle Campanus divides is the prime vertical: the great circle that runs from the east point of the horizon, up through the zenith directly overhead, down to the west point, and on beneath the earth. It is marked off every 30 degrees. Through each mark, and through the north and south points of the horizon, a great circle is drawn; where each one crosses the ecliptic is a house cusp.
The result is that each house is an equal wedge of the space around the observer — the only system in which the twelve houses are genuinely equal regions of the visible sphere. Measured along the zodiac, though, the houses are unequal, often more so than in Regiomontanus, and signs can be intercepted.
Where it comes from
The method was described by the Persian scholar al-Biruni in the eleventh century and later set out by Campanus of Novara (c. 1220–1296), an Italian mathematician and chaplain to popes, whose name it took. It was one of several methods taught in late medieval and Renaissance Europe — the Jesuit Clavius explained it alongside Regiomontanus's — but it was not the most used.
Its beauty is also the main objection to it. The prime vertical is defined by where the observer stands, not by the turning of the sky, and Regiomontanus is reported to have rejected it on exactly those grounds: the circle, he argued, has no power of its own, because the heavens do not move along it. Campanus's admirers reply that the houses describe the space around the native, and that a division of that space is precisely what is wanted.
When astrologers reach for it
- Some modern natal astrologers prefer it for its symmetry and its clear spatial meaning.
- Locational and mundane work, where the question is about directions around a place.
- Students of house systems, as the clearest example of the space-dividing family.
At high latitudes it keeps producing cusps where Placidus and Koch fail, but the houses become extremely distorted, and several signs can be swallowed by a single house.
In a reading here
Campanus is one of the seven house systems Viastaro offers. Charts use Placidus unless another system is chosen, as a default for the account and per person in the reading settings.