Part of Marriage

The Lot of Marriage is one of the lots that multiplied in the medieval Arabic and Latin tradition, where the small Hellenistic set of seven expanded enormously; Guido Bonatti in the thirteenth century lists ninety-seven parts, and later compilations list more. The expansion followed a simple rule of thumb, that a lot could be made for any topic by taking the arc between the two natural significators of that topic and projecting it from the Ascendant, and once that rule was accepted the number of possible lots was unlimited. Marriage is a clear case of what went wrong: several incompatible formulae are in circulation, differing in whether Venus and Saturn are taken in one order or the other and in whether the sect reversal applies, and there is no settled version. The one stored here is a common form, but a reader who finds a different figure elsewhere is not necessarily looking at an error.

The disagreement is not a defect in the transmission so much as a consequence of how the lots spread. The Hermetic core is small and its formulae are stable, because each lot in it is tied to a planet and to Fortune or Spirit in a fixed pattern. The lots that accumulated afterwards, in the Persian and Arabic material and then in the Latin compilations, were built ad hoc for particular questions, and nothing in the doctrine constrained two authors asking the same question to reach for the same planets. A reader meeting a lot of marriage in a modern text should therefore look for the formula printed beside it, and treat its absence as a reason for caution rather than as an omission of a detail everybody knows.

The day formula stored for this lot is Ascendant plus Venus minus Saturn. It is a plain lot with no other lot inside it, so nothing cancels and nothing doubles: one Ascendant, one fast-ish planet and one very slow one.

Its motion is therefore the Ascendant's, almost exactly. Venus adds about one degree a day and Saturn subtracts about two minutes of arc, so the lot advances one degree every three minutes and fifty nine seconds. A birth time good to the minute gives a placement good to a degree; a birth time given to the nearest quarter hour does not fix the degree, though it will usually fix the sign.

The arithmetic is the least of the difficulties with this lot, and this page's own description already records the reason: several incompatible formulae for a lot of marriage circulate, differing in which planets are used and in whether the terms reverse by sect. The formula above is the one this atlas stores. Any comparison of two marriage lots from two sources should begin by establishing that they are the same construction, because two lots bearing the same name and built from different planets are not two opinions about one point, they are two different points.

That is a general caution about the medieval expansion of the doctrine rather than about this lot alone. Bonatti transmits a very large number of lots, and the further from the Hermetic core a lot sits, the less agreement there is about how to build it.