Part of Death

The Lot of Death is unusual in the set because it is measured not from the Ascendant but from Saturn, taking the arc from the Moon to the cusp of the eighth house and projecting it from Saturn's place. That construction makes it dependent on the house system in use, since the eighth cusp differs between whole-sign, equal, Regiomontanus, Placidus and the rest, so the lot will fall in different degrees depending on a choice the astrologer has already made; it is the least stable of the parts for that reason. Length-of-life techniques were among the most technically elaborate parts of Hellenistic and medieval astrology, involving the hyleg or giver of life, the alcocoden and the direction of significators, and the lot is a small element within a much larger apparatus that most modern astrologers, including most traditional practitioners, decline to use.

Because the Lot of Death is measured from Saturn rather than from the Ascendant, it does not participate in the ordinary day and night sect reversal that governs the seven Hermetic lots, whose construction always begins from the Ascendant itself; its dependence instead on the eighth-house cusp ties its stability to whichever house system is in use, a modern astrologer's choice that has no equivalent uncertainty for an Ascendant-based lot, since the Ascendant itself is not house-system-dependent in the way a derived cusp is. This makes the Lot of Death one of the few in the whole set whose result changes with a technical choice, house division, that has nothing directly to do with sect, birth time accuracy, or planetary position.

The formula stored for this lot is Saturn plus the cusp of the eighth house minus the Moon, and it is the one lot in this atlas that is not projected from the Ascendant. That single difference carries more practical weight than anything else on the page.

Every other lot here depends on the birth time. This one depends on the birth time and on the house system. The Ascendant is an observed quantity that all house systems agree about. The eighth cusp is not: Placidus, Regiomontanus, Alcabitius, Porphyry, Campanus, Koch and Equal will put it in different places from the same birth data, and away from the equator the disagreement can run to many degrees and can cross a sign boundary. Two astrologers with identical birth data and different software will get different Lots of Death and neither will have made a mistake.

The motion is roughly the Ascendant's, because an intermediate cusp circles the zodiac once a day as the Ascendant does, though not at a uniform rate. The Moon subtracts about 13 degrees 11 minutes a day and Saturn adds two minutes of arc, so the lot advances something in the order of 347 degrees a day, about one degree every four minutes.

The reporting rule is therefore stricter than for the rest of the table: a Lot of Death should never be given without naming the house system it was cast in.