Almagest

The library · The profected years

The second profection year

general summary for a second house annual profection year (ages 1, 13, 25 and 37)

What the tradition reads

Annual profections give each year of a life to the next sign around the chart, counted in whole signs from the rising sign, so that the second sign from the Ascendant is reached in a person's second year, and again every twelfth year after that, at ages one, thirteen, twenty five and onward. The tradition reads a second house profection year through that house's own topics, and Alan Leo's summary of the twelve gives the second finance and monetary prospects, and the outcome of the labour or profession in remuneration and the monetary condition generally, while his chapter on the house holds that money is judged largely but not exclusively from it, since it belongs to a triad with the tenth and the sixth, but must be allowed final voice in the matter. It treats the ruler of the profected second sign, activated for the year as the lord of the year, as the single planet whose condition at birth and whose current transits matter most to understanding what the year is actually about. A second house year is read as suited to earnings, to money saved or spent, and to the plain reckoning of finance and monetary prospects Leo puts at the centre of the house. It stands opposite the eighth house year in the profection cycle, six years removed each way from the house Leo gives death and all matters pertaining to legacies, the goods of the dead and executorships.

The story

Vettius Valens, the second century astrologer from Antioch whose ten book Anthology is effectively the only substantial ancient source for the technique, worked annual profections through at least three books rather than setting the method out once, going back and forth and revisiting the technique several times; his approach leaned on his own case files, over a hundred sample charts tested against events whose outcome he already knew, which is part of why the technique reads as something built by trial against real dates rather than abstract theory alone. The arithmetic itself is unusually simple for its age, a person's age divided by twelve, the remainder counted forward from the Ascendant, workable without instruments once an astrologer had those two figures in hand. Annual profections largely dropped out of use once Hellenistic astrology itself declined, and returned to ordinary practice only as sources like 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 specifically to make the technique's simple arithmetic usable without specialist training.

Written from

Corpus key profection:2.