Africa

Ptolemy's fourth quarter, the southwest of the inhabited world, is the one he calls Libya, and he puts it in familiarity with the water triplicity, Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces. The lands he lists are the Mediterranean and Saharan north: Numidia, Carthage, Mauretania, Gaetulia and their neighbours.

That list is the whole of Africa as the scheme knows it. Ptolemy's inhabited world stops well short of the equator, and everything south of the Sahara lies outside the frame the chorography divides. So the quarter a modern retelling labels Africa covers a strip along the top of the continent, and the great majority of the landmass, along with every tradition that grew up in it, has no place in the system at all.

Egypt is the exception, and it is a large one. Egypt sits in the scheme with sign assignments of its own, and Egyptian material is woven through Hellenistic astrology at a far deeper level than the chorography suggests. The decans, the thirty six ten degree divisions of the zodiac, are an Egyptian construction taken into the Greek system, and the pseudonymous attribution of astrological texts to Egyptian authorities was a standard feature of the literature.

The atlas records both facts side by side, because they pull in opposite directions and both are true. The technique owes Egypt a great deal, and the technique's own map of the world barely sees the continent Egypt sits on.

Sources TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy with A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion

The gap described above is not a small one, and it is worth stating what follows from it.

An astrological chorography that stops at the Sahara has nothing to say about the divinatory and cosmological systems of the rest of the continent, and those systems are neither absent nor derivative. Ifa divination among the Yoruba, geomantic practice across West and North Africa, and the many regional traditions this atlas covers under their own entries developed on their own terms. Some of them share material with the Mediterranean world through long standing trade and through Islam, and geomancy in particular has a documented history of movement between North Africa, the Islamic world and Latin Europe. None of them is a branch of Ptolemy's system.

So this entry is deliberately narrow. It records what classical astrological chorography said about the part of Africa it knew, which is a small and specific claim, and it does not extend that claim over a continent. The African traditions the atlas holds are described where they belong, under their own names and their own sources, rather than fitted to a Mediterranean quartering that was never built to hold them.

The alternative, filling the gap with a modern assignment, would produce a table that looks complete and is not. Naming the limit is the more useful record, and it is the one this entry keeps.

Sources Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West AfricaWilliam Bascom with Recherches sur une technique divinatoire: la geomancie dans l'Occident medievalTherese Charmasson