Part of Spirit

The Lot of Spirit, kleros daimonos in Greek, is the counterpart of the Lot of Fortune and the second of the two on which the whole Hellenistic system of lots is built. A lot is a point derived by arc: the distance between two significators is measured and projected from the Ascendant, so that the lot carries the relationship between them to a place in the chart. Spirit is measured from the Sun as Fortune is from the Moon, and the two are reflections of one another across the Ascendant. Vettius Valens treats the pair at length in his Anthology, and the division of meaning is consistent: Fortune concerns the body, health, livelihood and what happens to a person, while Spirit concerns the mind, the will, deliberate action and what a person does. The pairing is one of the most characteristic features of Hellenistic technique and was largely lost in later western practice.

The formula makes the sect reversal explicit: by day, Spirit is found by measuring the arc from the Moon to the Sun and projecting that same arc forward from the Ascendant, Ascendant plus Sun minus Moon; by night the terms swap, Ascendant plus Moon minus Sun. This is the exact mirror of the formula for Fortune, which runs Ascendant plus Moon minus Sun by day and reverses by night, and the mirroring is the point: Fortune and Spirit are built from the same two lights in opposite order, so that whichever light leads by day trails by night, and the pair together map the two halves of the person, body and mind, onto the two possible birth conditions. Getting the day and night terms swapped, rather than merely omitted, is the single most common technical error made with this and every other sect-reversing lot in the Hellenistic set.

Spirit is the anchor of the set of lots that Paulus Alexandrinus attributes to Hermes: Fortune and Spirit themselves, and then Eros, Necessity, Courage, Victory and Nemesis, each assigned to one of the five planets and each computed not from the Ascendant alone but from Fortune or from Spirit. The set is a small system in itself, in which the two luminary lots supply the foundation and the five planetary lots are built on them, so that the whole is a projection of the planetary order onto the chart. Like Fortune, Spirit is calculated with a sect reversal, one way by day and the reverse by night, and the same is true of the derived lots. That reversal was dropped by much of twentieth-century astrology and has been restored by the revival of Hellenistic technique since the 1990s, which means that older textbooks and modern traditional practice will often disagree about where these points fall.

The reversal is worth stating precisely, because it is the point at which the doctrine of the lots meets the doctrine of sect and the two are often reported loosely. Sect divides the chart by whether the Sun is above or below the horizon at birth. In a day chart the Lot of Spirit is measured from the Sun to the Moon and projected from the ascendant; in a night chart the direction of that measurement reverses. The consequence is that Fortune and Spirit exchange places between a day and a night birth, so a chart cast a few minutes either side of sunrise or sunset can put the two lots in quite different parts of the wheel. Where the sect of a chart is genuinely in question, and near the horizon it often is, both lots should be reported as undetermined rather than one being chosen.