Almagest

The library · The profected years

The twelfth profection year

general summary for a twelfth house annual profection year (ages 11, 23, 35 and 47)

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 twelfth sign from the Ascendant is reached in a person's twelfth year, and again every twelfth year after, at ages eleven, twenty three, thirty five and onward. A twelfth house profection year is read through that house's own themes, and Alan Leo's summary of the twelve gives the twelfth the occult tendencies and, through its connection with the fourth, a psychic inheritance of thought from the past whose result may be joy as readily as sorrow; he calls it the most critical house of the twelve, the house of confinement, and the house of occultism and of physical self undoing, and his chapter reports it generally supposed the house of sorrow, enemies, imprisonment and misfortune. The ruler of the profected twelfth 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. A twelfth house year is read as suited to withdrawal, rest, or work done privately, since Leo's twelfth is the house of confinement and, as the cadent house of his psychic triangle, the least fortunate of the three. It stands opposite the sixth house year in the twelve year cycle, six years removed each way from the house Leo relates to work and servants, sickness, and the condition of the physical body.

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 approach 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. As the last house of the twelve year cycle, a twelfth house year also closes the sequence that began with the first house year at birth, before the cycle starts over; profections themselves nearly vanished from ordinary practice 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, closely tied to Chris Brennan's teaching under the name hellenisticastrology.com.

Written from

Corpus key profection:12.