Almagest

The library · The profected years

The eleventh profection year

general summary for an eleventh house annual profection year (ages 10, 22, 34 and 46)

What the tradition reads

Annual profections carry each year of a life one sign further around the wheel from the rising sign, so that the eleventh sign from the Ascendant is reached in a person's eleventh year, and again every twelfth year after, at ages ten, twenty two, thirty four and onward. An eleventh house profection year is read through that house's own themes, and Alan Leo's summary of the twelve gives the eleventh friends, acquaintances, hopes, wishes and aspirations; his chapter on it places it in a triangle with the seventh and the third, holds that free from affliction it may be considered a benefic house tending toward good fortune and happiness, and finds it strong in the charts of those concerned with the many rather than the few, through companies and societies. The ruler of the profected eleventh sign becomes the lord of the year, and its condition in the birth chart, together with its transits through the year, is read as the chief planetary theme running underneath everything else the year brings. An eleventh house year is read as suited to a new friendship, work within an association or society, or a hope brought nearer, since Leo's eleventh house carries both the friends and acquaintances and the hopes and wishes he says it indicates. It stands opposite the fifth house year in the twelve year cycle, six years removed each way from the house Leo gives offspring, pleasure and love affairs, and calls a material representation of the eleventh.

The story

Vettius Valens, the second century Antiochene astrologer whose ten book Anthology remains the only substantial ancient source for the technique, returned to annual profections repeatedly across at least three books of the work rather than treating it once, going back and forth and revisiting the technique several times; he worked from his own case files, over a hundred sample charts tested against events whose outcome he already knew, an approach that gives the technique the feel of a method built by trial against real, dated lives rather than reasoned out from first principles. The calculation itself needs no instrument, only a person's age divided by twelve and the remainder counted forward from the Ascendant. Annual profections largely disappeared from ordinary practice for centuries after Hellenistic astrology's own decline, and only returned to common use 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 simple arithmetic usable without specialist training.

Written from

Corpus key profection:11.