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Arabic Parts

Part of Nemesis

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Origin 75 to 378 CE

A lot of Saturn, built on the Lot of Fortune, signifying hidden weakness, hardship, retribution, and matters connected with the dead and the concealed. It is the heaviest of the Hermetic seven, and Greek sources treat it with a seriousness that the modern habit of reading every difficulty as growth tends to soften. It is worth noting that the delineations of this lot in the older material are fatalistic in a way most contemporary practice explicitly rejects.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
75 to 378 CE 1Tradition: Hellenistic astrology in Greco-Roman Egypt
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
800 to 1300 CE 2Tradition: Arabic and Latin medieval astrology
Place of Origin
Greco-Roman Egypt 3
Origin of the Name
"Arabic Parts" is a misnomer. These are the Hellenistic lots, Greek kleroi, already in use by Dorotheus, Vettius Valens and Paulus Alexandrinus centuries before any Arabic author. What the Arabic tradition did was multiply them and transmit them to Latin Europe 3
Language
Ancient Greek 3
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The Lot of Nemesis

The Lot of Nemesis, kleros nemeseos, is the lot of Saturn in the Hermetic set, built on the Lot of Fortune. Nemesis in Greek is retribution, the apportioning of what is deserved, and it was personified as the goddess who brings down the over-fortunate; the lot is read for hidden weakness, hardship, exaction, hindrance and matters connected with the dead and the concealed. Paulus gives it as the counterweight to Victory. Some Hellenistic authors also connect it with the manner of death and with what is buried or suppressed, which follows from its Saturnian assignment. Read as the tradition intends, it is not a prediction of disaster but the place in the chart where the account falls due, and it is meant to be judged against Victory rather than in isolation.

The day formula is Ascendant plus Fortune minus Saturn; by night the terms reverse, Ascendant plus Saturn minus Fortune. Being built from Fortune places Nemesis, like Courage and Necessity, among the circumstantial rather than volitional lots, so that its hardship and exaction are read as falling on a person from outside rather than as anything chosen or deserved in a moral sense, a distinction that softens the harshness of the name considerably once the underlying logic of the sevenfold set is understood.

The Arithmetic of Nemesis: Two Ascendants and a Slow Saturn

The day formula stored for this lot is Ascendant plus the Lot of Fortune minus Saturn. Expanding Fortune, which by day is Ascendant plus Moon minus Sun, gives Ascendant plus Ascendant plus Moon minus Sun minus Saturn. The Ascendant appears twice.

Nemesis therefore moves at twice the rate of the Ascendant, one degree every two minutes rather than every four, and a birth time wrong by an hour carries it a full sign. It shares that property with the Lot of Courage, the other lot in this set built on Fortune with the Ascendant left outside, and it carries the same warning: a Nemesis read from an approximate birth time is not a placement, it is a guess with a degree attached.

The Saturn term is nearly inert, moving about two minutes of arc a day, so it fixes which part of the zodiac the lot inhabits over a lifetime while contributing almost nothing to its motion within a day. Practically, the whole variation of this lot between two people born in the same year comes from the doubled Ascendant and the Moon.

The doctrinal reading of Nemesis as the lot of Saturn, of hidden weakness and retribution, therefore rests on the slowest and least individual term in its own formula. That is not an argument against the lot, but it is a fact about it that any careful reading should hold alongside the delineation.

A night birth reverses both this lot and Fortune, and the doubling has to be re-derived.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Originates in Language

Ancient Greek, Languages
Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion
Sources
1. Introduction to Astrology (Eisagogika)
Paulus Alexandrinus, 378the Lot of Nemesis
2. Liber Astronomiae
Guido Bonatti, The Golden Hind Press, 1277on the parts, of which Bonatti lists some hundred and forty-fiveView the Source
3. A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009vol. 1, on the formation of horoscopic astrology in Greco-Roman EgyptView the Source
Anthology (Anthologiarum Libri Novem)
Vettius Valens, B.G. Teubner, 175the Saturnian lot and matters of the deadView the Source
Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Chris Brennan, Amor Fati Publications, 2017On the lots, the Hermetic seven, and sect
Quote, On the lots, the Hermetic seven, and sect
Modern secondary treatment of the Greek lot doctrine and of the argument over reversal.
View the Source
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