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Hellenistic astrology
What it is
Hellenistic astrology is the astrology practised in the Greek-speaking world of the Mediterranean — above all in and around Alexandria in Egypt — from roughly the first century BCE to the seventh century CE. It drew together Babylonian sky-watching, Egyptian time-keeping and Greek philosophy, and out of them made something new: a chart cast for the moment and place of one person's birth, read as a picture of that person's life.
Almost everything a modern birth chart contains first appears in this tradition: the rising degree, which the Greeks called the hōroskopos ("hour-marker", the origin of the word horoscope); the twelve houses counted from it; the aspects as relationships between planets; the rulership of signs by planets; and the idea of the chart as a portrait.
Who wrote it
The earliest texts, attributed to the legendary figures Nechepso and Petosiris and to Hermes Trismegistus, survive only in fragments. The authors we can read include:
- Manilius, whose Latin poem Astronomica (early first century CE) is the oldest surviving long work;
- Dorotheus of Sidon (first century CE), whose verse survives mainly through a later Arabic version and shaped much of medieval practice;
- Ptolemy, whose Tetrabiblos (second century CE) gives astrology a systematic, natural-philosophical frame — and leaves out several techniques he could not justify;
- Vettius Valens (second century CE), whose Anthology is a working astrologer's notebook, full of real charts;
- Firmicus Maternus, Paulus Alexandrinus, Hephaistio of Thebes and Rhetorius, who carry the tradition into late antiquity.
They do not always agree. "Hellenistic" names a family of practices, not a single school.
What is distinctive about it
Several techniques that later fell out of use are central here:
- Whole-sign houses. The sign rising is the whole first house, the next sign the second, and so on — the oldest way of dividing a chart.
- Sect. Whether a chart is diurnal or nocturnal reorganises it: in a day chart the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn lead; at night the Moon, Venus and Mars.
- The lots. Calculated points such as the Lot of Fortune and the Lot of Spirit, each derived from the distance between two bodies and projected from the Ascendant.
- Dignities and rulers. Domicile and exaltation, but also the rulers of triplicity, the bounds and the decans.
- The planetary joys — the house each planet "rejoices" in, which explains many traditional house meanings.
- Time-lords. Methods that hand periods of life to particular planets, such as annual profections and Valens's zodiacal releasing.
Where it went
Hellenistic astrology travelled. A Greek text translated into Sanskrit in the early centuries CE, the Yavanajātaka, left its mark on Vedic astrology. In Sasanian Persia the books of Valens and Dorotheus were translated into Middle Persian; from there they passed into Arabic, and from Arabic into medieval Latin, reaching Renaissance writers such as William Lilly. Each step was a translation of a translation, and some techniques were lost or reshaped on the way.
The modern revival
From 1993 Project Hindsight — Robert Schmidt, with Robert Hand and Robert Zoller — began translating the Greek texts directly into English, and many astrologers read Valens and Dorotheus for the first time. Whole-sign houses, sect, the lots and the time-lord techniques came back into wide use, and books by Chris Brennan and Demetra George have since made the tradition accessible to beginners.
Opinions differ on what the revival means. Some find Hellenistic methods sharper and more concrete than modern psychological astrology; others note that the ancient authors wrote from a more fatalistic outlook — their subject was fate and fortune — and prefer to read the techniques in the gentler register of inclination. Many astrologers today mix the two, using the old structure with a modern voice.