Dying

Death has a house and it has a chapter, and the two approach it differently.

The house is the eighth. Lilly gives it death and the manner of it, wills, legacies, the dowry, and the goods of the dead. In the Greek scheme the same place is the Idle Place and it has no planetary joy. The eighth follows the seventh, so in the logic of the sequence it is what comes after the other party has been dealt with, and it holds what passes from one person to another when one of them is no longer there.

The chapter is Ptolemy's, in the fourth book, on the quality of death. It is worth noticing what that title claims and what it does not. Ptolemy is not offering a date. He is asking what kind of death, and reading the answer from the planets afflicting the relevant place: whether it is sudden or slow, in public or alone, by violence, by illness or by age. The tradition's confidence about kind and its reticence about timing is a real feature of it rather than a failure of nerve.

Saturn is the general significator. It is the greater malefic, cold and dry, the outermost of the seven visible planets and the boundary of the classical cosmos, and everything about its signification is terminal: limit, age, decay, endings, and time as a thing that runs out.

Sources TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy with Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly

Length of life is one of the oldest problems in astrology and one of the most heavily hedged. Ptolemy gives it a long chapter in the third book, built on a prorogator, the point that gives out the life, and a destroyer that ends it; the medieval tradition calls these the hyleg and the anareta. The method has enough steps and enough exceptions that no two later authorities apply it identically.

That elaboration is itself a finding. A technique with many conditions is a technique whose practitioners kept meeting results they had to account for, and the length of life literature has that shape throughout its history. Bonatti in the thirteenth century and Lilly in the seventeenth both carry the method forward and both add qualifications to it.

There is also a long record of the practice being restricted. Predicting a death from a chart has been treated as improper, dangerous or forbidden in several of the periods this material comes from, sometimes by astrologers themselves and sometimes by the authorities over them. That restriction is part of the tradition and belongs in any description of it.

Modern astrology adds Pluto to the eighth house significators, taking it to rule Scorpio and to govern transformation, compulsion and what is buried. Traditional practice does not accept the outer planet rulerships and keeps Mars as the lord of Scorpio and Saturn as the significator of endings. Both positions have practitioners today, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it.

Sources TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy with Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly, Liber AstronomiaeGuido Bonatti