The Lot of the Mother

The Lot of the Mother is taken from the Moon and Venus, following the same doctrine of natural significators that gives Saturn and the Sun to the father. As with the paternal lot, sources disagree about the order of the terms and about the sect reversal. The family lots are a good illustration of the general difficulty with the medieval expansion: because the rule for constructing a lot is mechanical, a lot can be made for any topic whatever, and the tradition duly made hundreds, with the result that no individual lot carries much authority and the interpretive weight that the two Hellenistic luminary lots had is dissipated. Practitioners of the revived traditional astrology of the last thirty years have generally responded by returning to the small Hermetic set and using the rest, if at all, with caution.

As with the Lot of the Father, sources agree that the Lot of the Mother draws on the Moon and Venus, the natural significators of the mother, but do not agree on the arc's direction, and some medieval compilers appear to apply it without a day or night reversal at all, in contrast to the strict sect sensitivity of the seven Hermetic lots. Because the mother and father lots are mirror constructions in their choice of significators, some later astrologers reasoned by analogy that whatever direction convention is chosen for one should be applied consistently to the other, though this is an inference from symmetry rather than an instruction stated in the surviving classical sources themselves.