Almagest

The library · The profected years

The sixth profection year

general summary for a sixth house annual profection year (ages 5, 17, 29 and 41)

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 sixth sign from the Ascendant is reached in a person's sixth year, and again every twelfth year after, at ages five, seventeen, twenty nine and onward. A sixth house profection year is read through that house's own themes, and Alan Leo's summary of the twelve gives the sixth service and the attachments arising from the expression of the tenth house, servants, and sickness arising from worry and anxiety, while his chapter on it connects it with the mid-heaven and the second house and relates it to work and servants, to sickness, and to the condition of the physical body. The ruler of the profected sixth sign becomes the lord of the year, and the tradition reads its natal condition, along with its transits through the year, as the chief planetary theme running underneath everything else the year brings. A sixth house year is read as suited to a change of work or daily routine, since Leo's sixth house holds both the work a person is engaged in and the condition of the physical body. What the tradition assigns is recorded here, with no counsel about health intended. It stands opposite the twelfth house year in the twelve year cycle, six years removed each way from the house Leo calls that of self undoing and reports to be generally supposed the house of sorrow, enemies, imprisonment and misfortune.

The story

Vettius Valens, the second century astrologer from Antioch whose ten book Anthology is the only substantial surviving ancient source for the technique, set annual profections out across at least three books of the work rather than in a single place, going back and forth and revisiting the technique several times; his practice relied on his own case files, over a hundred sample charts tested against events whose outcome he already knew, which gives the technique the character of something proven by trial against dated lives rather than argued out abstractly. The arithmetic itself is unusually plain, a person's age divided by twelve, the remainder counted forward from the Ascendant, workable by any astrologer of the period without instruments. Profections nearly vanished from ordinary practice for centuries after Hellenistic astrology's own decline, and returned to common use only once texts like the Anthology were properly translated and taught again from the late twentieth century onward, a revival closely tied to Chris Brennan's teaching under the name hellenisticastrology.com, which built the worksheets that make the technique usable without specialist training.

Written from

Corpus key profection:6.