As the western angle, the Descendant complements the eastern Ascendant, and like the other three angles it was a fixture of Hellenistic horoscopy from its earliest surviving technical manuals; Firmicus Maternus lists it among the cardines in his fourth century Mathesis, and quadrant based house division, worked out fully in this Hellenistic period, uses the Ascendant-Descendant axis together with the Midheaven-Imum Coeli axis to divide a chart into its four quarters.
The Descendant is abbreviated DC or, less often, Dsc in chart notation, mirroring the AC/Asc pairing used for the Ascendant. The Greek kentron behind the Latin cardo could mean either a sharp goad, the kind used to drive an animal, or the pivot at the center of a turning wheel, and both senses were applied to the four angles as the points that seem to drive the chart's daily rotation. Because it sits at exactly 180 degrees from the Ascendant, its position was never calculated independently once the rising degree was known, unlike the Midheaven, which requires its own separate reference to the meridian. On the now standard circular wheel chart the Descendant sits opposite the Ascendant at roughly the three o'clock position, a diagramming convention that replaced the older square horoscope format, itself used across Western, Indian and Chinese astrology for centuries, only around the nineteenth century.