Almagest

The library · The profected years

The eighth profection year

general summary for an eighth house annual profection year (ages 7, 19, 31 and 43)

What the tradition reads

Annual profections carry each year of a life one sign further around the chart from the rising sign, so that the eighth sign from the Ascendant is reached in a person's eighth year, and again every twelfth year after, at ages seven, nineteen, thirty one and onward. An eighth house profection year is read through that house's own themes, and Alan Leo's summary gives the eighth death and all matters pertaining to legacies, calling it an occult house for its relation to the fourth. His chapter on the second adds money inherited and money coming to a person through other people, chiefly the business or marriage partner, and his chapter on the eighth names the goods of the dead and executorships, and sets beside dissolution a regeneration or rebirth. The ruler of the profected eighth sign becomes the lord of the year, and its condition at birth, together with its transits during the year, is read as the chief planetary theme running underneath everything else the year brings. An eighth house year is read as suited to money held with or owed to another, a legacy, or a change of the kind Leo files under dissolution, since his eighth house carries both the money that comes through other people and the regeneration he sets beside it. It stands opposite the second house year in the twelve year cycle, six years removed each way from the house Leo gives finance and monetary prospects and allows final voice in questions of money.

The story

Vettius Valens, the second century astrologer from Antioch whose ten book Anthology is effectively the only substantial surviving ancient source for the technique, worked annual profections through at least three books rather than in a single passage, going back and forth and revisiting the technique several times; his approach drew on his own case files, over a hundred sample charts tested against events whose outcome he already knew, which gives the technique the feel of something built by trial against real dated lives rather than reasoned out from theory alone. The arithmetic is plain enough for any astrologer of the period to perform unaided, a person's age divided by twelve, the remainder counted forward from the Ascendant. Annual profections largely disappeared from common practice for centuries after Hellenistic astrology's own decline, and returned to ordinary use only once texts such as the Anthology were properly translated and taught again from the late twentieth century onward, a revival closely associated with Chris Brennan's teaching under the name hellenisticastrology.com, which built worksheets and wheels to make the technique's arithmetic usable without specialist training.

Written from

Corpus key profection:8.