Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Irrational Part, and What the Tradition Made of It

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The Irrational Part, and What the Tradition Made of It

Ptolemy's division of the soul puts the appetites in the sensitive or irrational part, under the Moon, and the chapter that follows it in the third book is on the diseases of the soul: excess, compulsion, and the appetites out of proportion.

It is worth being clear about what that framing carries. Classical and medieval astrology inherits a moral psychology in which the appetites are the lower part of a person and reason the higher, and the technical texts assume it throughout. So the same placements that describe a rich sensory life are the ones the tradition reaches for when it wants to describe intemperance, and the difference between the two readings is often supplied by the astrologer's judgement rather than by the chart.

The atlas records the doctrine as the sources hold it and does not adopt its evaluations. A description of Venus and the Moon in a nativity is a description of how a person is disposed toward pleasure. Whether a given disposition is a virtue or a fault is not a question a chart answers, and the periods that thought it was were reading their own ethics back out of the sky.

Modern astrology has largely dropped the moral frame while keeping the significators, which is a change in doctrine rather than in presentation. Sensuality is now generally read as a capacity rather than a risk, and this entry records both readings, because both are in current print and a reader will meet either.

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