The Lot of Marriage, and the Problem of the Medieval Lots

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.