Almagest

The library · The profected years

The fifth profection year

general summary for a fifth house annual profection year (ages 4, 16, 28 and 40)

What the tradition reads

Annual profections carry each year of a life one sign further from the rising sign, so that the fifth sign from the Ascendant is reached in a person's fifth year, and again every twelfth year after, at ages four, sixteen, twenty eight and onward. A fifth house profection year is read through that house's own themes, and Alan Leo's summary of the twelve gives the fifth offspring, the pleasurable emotions arising from the senses, and worldly enterprise and energy, while his chapter on it, headed children, enterprise, speculations, gains and love affairs, opens on pleasure, society and social inclinations and the emotions and feelings, and names love affairs and courtships. The ruler of the profected fifth sign becomes the lord of the year, and its condition in the birth chart, together with whatever it does by transit during the year, is read as the chief planetary theme running underneath everything else the year brings. A fifth house year is read as suited to a romance begun or deepened, an enterprise or a speculation, or a matter concerning a child, since Leo's fifth house carries both offspring and the enterprise and activity he says is prompted by the desire nature. It stands opposite the eleventh house year in the twelve year cycle, six years removed each way from the house Leo gives friends, acquaintances, hopes, wishes and aspirations, and of which he calls the fifth a material representation.

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:5.