Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Americas

The combined continents of North and South America, home to Aztec, Maya and countless indigenous cosmologies. They lie entirely outside the inhabited world that classical chorography divided, so the tradition assigns them no quarter, no triplicity and no ruling planet.

Facts
Geography
Latitude
28 degrees north 1
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim.
Longitude
84.4 degrees west 1
Approximate reference point, rounded to one decimal place; a large or historical region has no formal center, so this coordinate is conventional, not a precise boundary claim.
Origins
Region
Outside the oikoumene, the inhabited world that classical chorography divides 2Tradition: Hellenistic astrology
Open Questions
Zodiac Rulership
None assigned. No quarter, triplicity or planetary co-ruler was ever given to the western hemisphere by the tradition that built the chorography. 2Tradition: Hellenistic astrology
Not a disputed reading and not a lost passage. The hemisphere was unknown to the scheme and its authors, so the tradition holds no position to recover. Nothing proposed later has acquired the standing the classical quarter assignments carry. See the open question on this entry.
Identity
Element
None assigned. Outside the oikoumene that classical chorography divides into quarters and triplicities, the Americas received no elemental assignment any more than a quarter or a ruling sign. 2
Disputed
Tradition
Mundane astrology works from national charts here instead, and the several charts proposed for the United States disagree about the rising sign and therefore about almost everything downstream of it. 3Tradition: Modern Western astrology
Practitioners hold competing positions on which national chart and which rising sign is correct. The dispute concerns particular nations rather than the continent, and it does not supply a chorographic assignment.
Learn More
Outside the Inhabited World

The Americas have no place in classical astrological chorography, and the reason is simple and total. The scheme divides the oikoumene, the inhabited world known to a second century Greek writing in Alexandria, and the Americas were not in it.

This is a different situation from a gap in a record. There is no lost passage, no disputed reading and no competing tradition to weigh. Ptolemy's four quarters cover a landmass reaching from the Atlantic coasts of Europe and North Africa to India and central Asia, and the whole of the western hemisphere lies outside the frame. No quarter, no triplicity and no planetary co-ruler was ever assigned to it by the tradition that built the scheme.

Later astrology has filled the gap in various ways, and none of them carries the authority the classical assignments do. Mundane astrologers work from national charts instead, most famously the several competing charts proposed for the United States, which disagree about the rising sign and therefore about almost everything downstream of it. That is a live dispute among practitioners rather than a settled assignment, and it operates on nations rather than on a continent.

The atlas records the absence as an absence, with an open question attached to it, rather than supplying a plausible looking ruler that no source supports. A fabricated entry in a correspondence table is worse than an empty one, because a table is read as a record.

Sources TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy with A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion

The Cosmologies That Were Already There

What the Americas do hold, at length, is astronomical and calendrical systems developed independently of anything in this vocabulary, and the atlas covers them under their own names rather than folding them into a Western scheme.

The Mesoamerican calendars are the clearest case. The 260 day tzolkin of twenty day signs and thirteen numbers, the 365 day haab, and the Long Count are Maya and wider Mesoamerican constructions with their own internal logic, their own deities and their own divinatory use. The Aztec tonalpohualli runs on the same 260 day cycle with its own day signs and its own lords of the night. Andean, North American and Amazonian traditions carry further systems again, several of which read the sky by dark cloud constellations and by horizon calendars rather than by a zodiac at all.

None of these is a version of the Greek technique and none translates into it. A zodiac sign does not map onto a day sign, a planetary ruler does not map onto a lord of the night, and an attempt to run the correspondence produces something belonging to neither tradition.

So this entry stays narrow on purpose. Its subject is the classical chorography's silence about the hemisphere, which is a fact about the chorography. The living and historical traditions of the Americas are described in the atlas under their own entries, in their own terms, and several of them are practised today by communities who are the authority on them.

Sources Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An IntroductionJ. Eric S. Thompson with Time and the Highland MayaBarbara Tedlock

Connections

Associated With

This source names Americas directly: "A news article on The Yeshiva World, an Orthodox Jewish news site, dated 26 June 2015, reporting Agudath Israel of America's statement on the U.S."

Source Statement From Agudath Israel of America on the Supreme Court Ruling Regarding Same Gender Marriage (The Yeshiva World)

This source names Americas directly: "Agudath Israel of America's own statement on its official site, dated 26 June 2015, responding to the U.S."

Source Statement on the Supreme Court's Ruling Regarding Same Sex Marriage (Agudath Israel of America)the holders' own account

This source names Americas directly: "The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s own retrospective account of its founding reunion service, held 10 June 1983 at the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia."

Source Stories From GA: 1983 Reunion (Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.))

This source names Americas directly: "The Coalition of Hindus of North America's 2022 submission to a House of Commons of Canada committee on Bill C-229 argues for the term "Nazi Hakenkreuz" rather than "swastika" in proposed Canadian..."

Source Submission to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-229Coalition of Hindus of North America

This source names Americas directly: "A US-based nonprofit founded within the Sufi community and dedicated, in its own words, to actualizing human spiritual potential and serving those in need."

Source Sufi Service Committee: Own Website (sufiservice.org)Sufi Service Committee

This source names Americas directly: "The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's own summary of congregational statistics as of December 31, 1988, its first full year following the January 1988 merger, giving national end-of-year..."

Source Summary of Congregational Statistics as of 12-31-1988

This source names Americas directly: "The office John Wesley created in 1784 when he ordained Thomas Coke general superintendent for the fledgling Methodist societies in America, a functional office of oversight rather than a third holy..."

Source The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist ChurchUnited Methodist Churchthe holders' own account

This source names Americas directly: "The Seventh-day Adventist Church held its 61st General Conference Session, the denomination's quinquennial world business meeting, at the America's Center Convention Complex in St."

Source Wilson Re-Elected as GC President and Other Actions from GC Session (Upper Columbia Conference)

This source names Americas directly: "In 1888, the third Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, meeting in London a generation after the Archbishop of Canterbury convened the first such conference there in 1867, already recorded here..."

Source The Chicago-Lambeth QuadrilateralThe Lambeth Conferencethe holders' own account

This source names Americas directly: "The 1912 standardized birthstone list, adopted at the annual convention of the National Association of Jewelers, now Jewelers of America, is a primary trade-industry source, the actual document that..."

Source The 1912 standardised birthstone list adopted at the annual convention, Kansas CityNational Association of Jewelers (now Jewelers of America)

This source names Americas directly: "The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795, is Thomas Paine's popularisation of deist argument, written in the plain, widely accessible style that had already made his political..."

Source The Oxford Dictionary of World ReligionsJohn Bowker (ed.)

This source names Americas directly: "In July 1875, representatives of twenty one Presbyterian and Reformed church bodies from Europe and North America met at the English Presbyterian College in London and adopted the name the Alliance..."

Source WCRC History and Timeline (World Communion of Reformed Churches)

This source names Americas directly: "Communion's provinces in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania."

Source The Lambeth Conference: A Global Gathering of Bishops (Anglican Communion Office)

This source names Americas directly: "On 31 October 1731 Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian of Salzburg ordered the expulsion of all Protestants from his archbishopric, over 20,000 people by the source's own count, the landless given..."

Source Salzburg Protestants (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Americas directly: "Africa and over a third in the Americas, a demographic outcome the Los Angeles revival's own early participants could not have anticipated."

Source The Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal MovementCecil M. Robeck Jr.

This source names Americas directly: "On 13 October 2016 the Baha'i Faith dedicated its continental House of Worship for South America, in Penalolen, Santiago, Chile, designed by architect Siamak Hariri."

Source Santiago Baha'i Temple (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Americas directly: "The largest nongovernmental field study of Black churches ever undertaken, drawing on interviews with more than 1,800 Black clergy across the seven historic denominations of the Black Church: the..."

Source The Black Church in the African American ExperienceC. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya

This source names Americas directly: "In 1925, nineteen years after Japan's Home Ministry ordered the shrine merger policy in 1906, already recorded here, and sixteen years before wartime suspicion suppressed Shinto in America in 1941..."

Source The Chosen Jingu Imperial Shrine and Schools in Colonial Korea (Studies in the History of Education)Satoko Hiura

This source names Americas directly: "A weekly Unitarian newspaper first issued April 20, 1821 in Boston under editor David Reed, four years before the American Unitarian Association itself was founded in 1825."

Source Christian Register (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Americas directly: "With the American Revolution having severed American Methodists from the Church of England, John Wesley reluctantly agreed to let the movement in America organise as its own church, sending Thomas..."

Source American Saint: Francis Asbury and the MethodistsJohn Wigger

This source names Americas directly: "Part of the Denominations in America series, this is a scholarly survey of the Congregationalist tradition from the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay settlements through the Cambridge Platform, the..."

Source The CongregationalistsJ. William T. Youngs

This source names Americas directly: "An essay on Tradition Online, the web publication of the Rabbinical Council of America's journal Tradition, naming specific medieval Jewish astrologers who applied Saturn-Jupiter conjunction theory..."

Source The Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Medieval Jewish ThoughtJeremy Brown

This source names Americas directly: "By the late nineteenth century Methodism had multiplied into dozens of separate connexions and denominations across Britain, America and the mission field, and roughly four hundred delegates from..."

Source About Us (World Methodist Council)World Methodist Council

This source names Americas directly: "On 19 August 1999, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Churchwide Assembly, meeting in Denver, voted 1,007 to 11 to enter full communion with the Moravian Church in America under the..."

Source ELCA Approves Full Communion With Moravian Church (WFN.org)

This source names Americas directly: "David Hein and Gardiner H."

Source The EpiscopaliansDavid Hein and Gardiner H. Shattuck Jr.

This source names Americas directly: "On 21 May 1789, Presbyterian ministers and elders gathered at Second Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for the first General Assembly of the newly reorganized Presbyterian Church in the United..."

Source First General Assembly of the PCUSA (Association of Religion Data Archives)

This source names Americas directly: "Around 1910, close to two-thirds of the world's Christians lived in Europe."

Source Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian PopulationPew Research Center

This source names Americas directly: "Clement Falbo's The Golden Ratio, A Contrary Viewpoint is a peer reviewed article in the College Mathematics Journal, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America, examining popular..."

Source The Golden Ratio: A Contrary ViewpointClement Falbo

This source names Americas directly: "Thomas S."

Source The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial AmericaThomas S. Kidd

This source names Americas directly: "GAFCON's own page presenting the Jerusalem Declaration, issued at the Global Anglican Future Conference held in Jerusalem from 22 to 29 June 2008."

Source The Jerusalem Statement (GAFCON)

This source names Americas directly: "Allan Greer, editor, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America, Bedford Saint Martin's, 2000, is a scholarly edited selection, with a substantial..."

Source The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North AmericaAllan Greer, editor

This source names Americas directly: "colonisation and, as elsewhere in the Americas, with the destruction of existing Indigenous religious life and increasingly with the forced labour of both Indigenous people and, before long..."

Source The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540-1750Dauril Alden

This source names Americas directly: "For its first century the church remained overwhelmingly American, but a sustained expansion of full-time missionary work after the Second World War, and especially from the 1960s onward, carried..."

Source The Oxford Handbook of MormonismTerryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (eds.)

This source names Americas directly: "On 11 September 1955 church president David O."

Source Bern Switzerland Temple (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Americas directly: "The National Trust for Historic Preservation's feature on the architect Wallace A."

Source The Legacy Of Pioneering African American Architect Wallace A. RayfieldNational Trust for Historic Preservation

This source names Americas directly: "The Lonely Man of Faith, Joseph B."

Source The Lonely Man of FaithJoseph B. Soloveitchik

This source names Americas directly: "On 26 April 1847, twelve pastors representing fourteen congregations from Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, New York and Ohio met in Chicago and signed a constitution founding the German..."

Source About The LCMS (LCMS.org)

This source names Americas directly: "the oldest known surviving book in the Americas."

Source The Maya Codex of Mexico: authentication of the former Grolier Codex (INAH, 2018)Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historiathe holders' own account

This source names Americas directly: "The International Pentecostal Holiness Church's own General Superintendent's Office account of the 1994 Memphis Miracle, documenting the 18 October 1994 dissolution of the Pentecostal Fellowship of..."

Source The Memphis Miracle (International Pentecostal Holiness Church)

This source names Americas directly: "On 18 October 1994, during the Pentecostal Partners conference at Memphis, Tennessee, delegates of the all white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, founded in 1948, voted to dissolve the..."

Source The Memphis Miracle (International Pentecostal Holiness Church)

This source names Americas directly: "Twenty three years after Henry Appenzeller arrived in Korea and founded the first Methodist mission there in 1885, already recorded here, and twenty four years before three British Methodist..."

Source The 1908 Social Creed of the Methodist Episcopal Church (General Board of Church and Society)

This source names Americas directly: "The Moravian Book of Worship is the current hymnal and liturgy book of the Moravian Church in America, published in 1995 by the Interprovincial Board of Publications and Communications, a 954 page..."

Source Moravian Book of Worship (Moravian Music Foundation product record)Moravian Church in America

This source names Americas directly: "The Music of the Moravian Church in America, edited by Nola Reed Knouse, is a scholarly collection of essays on the distinctive musical tradition of the Moravian Church in North America, written by..."

Source The Music of the Moravian Church in AmericaNola Reed Knouse (editor)
The Nasca, Sources

This source names Americas directly: "Helaine Silverman and Donald A."

Source The NascaHelaine Silverman and Donald A. Proulx

This source names Americas directly: "The Passion of the Christ is a 2004 film directed by Mel Gibson depicting the last twelve hours of the life of Jesus, from the night before his arrest in Gethsemane through his trial, scourging and..."

Source The Passion of the Christ (2004 film) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Americas directly: "An article by Rick Plasterer on Juicy Ecumenism, dated 28 June 2024, reporting the Presbyterian Church in America's 51st General Assembly giving final approval to Overture 23, which had already been..."

Source The Presbyterian Church in America Moves Forward (Juicy Ecumenism)

This source names Americas directly: "On 10 June 1983, at the World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America united to form the..."

Source Stories From GA: 1983 Reunion (Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.))

This source names Americas directly: "Sixty nine years after Lutheranism was established in North America between 1742 and 1748, already recorded here, and thirty years before the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, organized in Chicago in..."

Source Christopher Clark, Confessional Policy and the Limits of State Action (The Historical Journal)Christopher Clark

This source names Americas directly: "David Christopher Lane is a sociologist who has published extensively and critically on Sant Mat and Radhasoami successor movements, including a separate study of Paul Twitchell and Eckankar (14691)..."

Source The Radhasoami Tradition: A Critical History of Guru SuccessorshipDavid Christopher Lane

This source names Americas directly: "David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi and professor of Jewish history, argues that messianic claims some Chabad-Lubavitch leaders made about Menachem Mendel Schneerson after his 1994 death, that he could..."

Source The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox IndifferenceDavid Berger

Showing 151 to 200 of 250 in Associated With, page 4 of 5.

Contrasts With

Africa, Continents

Africa holds the southwest quarter, at least in its northern strip. The Americas hold no quarter at all.

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy
Asia, Continents

Asia holds two of the four quarters of the classical chorography. The Americas hold none, because the hemisphere lay outside the inhabited world the scheme divides.

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy
Europe, Continents

Europe is the northwest quarter of the classical chorography. The Americas were unknown to it and were never assigned a quarter.

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy
Global, Continents

Global is not a landmass. It marks material whose spread crosses the continents rather than belonging to one of them.

Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion

Namesake Of

Named in 1946 for the Americas, chosen deliberately to echo europium, which sits directly above it in the periodic table. An etymological link only, not a claim that the element carries anything of the place.

Source Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the ElementsJohn Emsley

Spread Events Here

The United States and Canada in particular. The map places this across the wider Americas, since the population described spans both countries.

Source A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World OrderKambiz GhaneaBassiri
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Tetrabiblos
Claudius Ptolemy, W. Foulsham, 1900Book II, on the familiarities of countries with the triplicities and starsView the Source
3. A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009Book description
Quote, Book description
This is the first comprehensive examination of the origins of western astrology from ancient times to the end of the classical world, around 500 BCE.
View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
Does any authority extend the classical astrological chorography to the Americas, and on what reasoning?

Ptolemy's four quarters divide only the oikoumene, the inhabited world known in the second century, and the western hemisphere lies wholly outside it. No quarter, triplicity or planetary co-ruler was ever assigned to the Americas by the tradition that built the scheme, and nothing proposed since has acquired comparable standing. This is not a lost passage or a disputed reading; it is an absence created by the geographic horizon of the source.

What would resolve this A survey of the mundane astrological literature from the sixteenth century onward, when the Americas entered European awareness, establishing whether any author extended the chorography to the new hemisphere, on what reasoning, and whether the extension was taken up by anyone else. A negative result would settle the entry as firmly as a positive one, and either way the entry ceases to be an open absence.
History of astrology; early modern intellectual history; history of geographic knowledgeNicholas Campion, A History of Western Astrology
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