Part of Children

The Lot of Children is built on Jupiter, the natural significator of offspring in this tradition, and Saturn, and belongs to the medieval expansion of the lots rather than to the Hellenistic core. Questions about children were among the most frequently asked of astrologers in the medieval and early modern periods, and the handbooks of Bonatti and later of William Lilly treat them at length, using the fifth house, its ruler, the fertile and barren signs, and lots of this kind together. Variant formulae exist here as elsewhere. It is worth adding plainly that judgments of this sort were made in societies where childlessness carried heavy social and economic consequences, and that the confidence of the older texts on such matters should be read in that light rather than taken at face value.

Paulus Alexandrinus gives a formula for the Lot of Children built from Jupiter and Saturn, the standard significators of offspring and of endurance respectively in this branch of the tradition, but medieval compilers who inherited the lot did not preserve a single agreed direction for the arc, and the surviving Arabic and Latin sources show real disagreement about which of the two terms leads by day and which by night, a disagreement this entry does not attempt to resolve rather than assert one variant as settled. What is consistent across the sources is the choice of significators themselves and the lot's place among the medieval expansion that multiplied named parts for every topic of life a client might ask about.

The day formula stored for this lot is Ascendant plus Saturn minus Jupiter. Both planetary terms are slow: Saturn moves about two minutes of arc a day and Jupiter about five, and they are subtracted one from the other, so between them they change the lot by roughly three minutes of arc a day in the ordinary case.

The motion of the lot is therefore the Ascendant's and nothing else worth counting. It advances one degree every four minutes and covers the whole zodiac in a day.

That gives an unusually clean statement of what the lot depends on. Everything individual about a Lot of Children is the birth time. Two people born on the same day anywhere in the world have their Saturn and Jupiter terms in common to within three minutes of arc, so the entire difference between their lots is the difference in what was rising. A birth time wrong by two hours puts the lot in the wrong sign; a birth time wrong by four minutes puts it in the wrong degree.

There is a second point in the relationship between the two planets. Saturn minus Jupiter is the elongation between the two slowest classical planets, which returns to the same value about every twenty years at each Jupiter and Saturn conjunction. The lot therefore carries a twenty-year cycle inside it that is shared by everyone born in the same period, and only the Ascendant distinguishes them.