Part of 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.

The day formula stored for this lot is Ascendant plus the Moon minus Venus. Unlike most lots in this set the fast body is added rather than subtracted, so the Moon's motion works with the Ascendant instead of against it.

The lot advances about 372 degrees a day: a full Ascendant circle, plus the Moon's 13 degrees 11 minutes, less Venus's degree or so. That is one degree every three minutes and fifty two seconds, marginally faster than the Ascendant itself, and it means the Lot of the Mother is among the handful of points in a horoscope that complete more than one circuit of the zodiac in a day.

The requirement that follows is the ordinary one for an angle-driven lot. The birth time has to be recorded to the minute for the degree to mean anything, and to a quarter hour or so for the sign to be safe.

The choice of bodies is worth noting beside the Lot of the Father. There Saturn and the Sun, the two classical significators of the father, are set against each other. Here the Moon and Venus, which carry the maternal signification between them in the same scheme, are set against each other in the same way, the Moon by sect and Venus by nature. The pair of lots is built on a consistent principle, which is one reason they are usually transmitted together and one reason a variant formula for either should be treated with suspicion.