The Lot of Children

The Lot of Children is built on Jupiter, the natural significator of offspring in this tradition, and Saturn, and belongs to the medieval expansion of the lots rather than to the Hellenistic core. Questions about children were among the most frequently asked of astrologers in the medieval and early modern periods, and the handbooks of Bonatti and later of William Lilly treat them at length, using the fifth house, its ruler, the fertile and barren signs, and lots of this kind together. Variant formulae exist here as elsewhere. It is worth adding plainly that judgments of this sort were made in societies where childlessness carried heavy social and economic consequences, and that the confidence of the older texts on such matters should be read in that light rather than taken at face value.

Paulus Alexandrinus gives a formula for the Lot of Children built from Jupiter and Saturn, the standard significators of offspring and of endurance respectively in this branch of the tradition, but medieval compilers who inherited the lot did not preserve a single agreed direction for the arc, and the surviving Arabic and Latin sources show real disagreement about which of the two terms leads by day and which by night, a disagreement this entry does not attempt to resolve rather than assert one variant as settled. What is consistent across the sources is the choice of significators themselves and the lot's place among the medieval expansion that multiplied named parts for every topic of life a client might ask about.