A Minor Aspect

A novile is the aspect of forty degrees, a ninth of the circle. It is a harmonic aspect associated with twentieth-century harmonic astrology rather than with Johannes Kepler's earlier reform, and its currency in Western practice owes most to John Addey, whose Harmonics in Astrology, published in 1976, treated the ninefold division as one of several numerical cycles the older sign-based aspect set could not register. The ninefold division of a circle is considerably older in a different tradition: in Vedic astrology the navamsa, the ninth subdivision of each zodiac sign used in the divisional charts, is among the most heavily consulted, particularly for marriage and for judging a planet's inner strength, though that technique divides individual signs rather than measuring an angle between two bodies, so it is a parallel use of the number nine rather than a direct ancestor of the Western novile aspect.

The novile is generally read as an aspect of gestation and inward development, ripening rather than sudden event, an association some writers connect loosely to the nine months of human pregnancy, though that link is a mnemonic rather than a documented part of Addey's own reasoning for including the aspect. Addey's method treated the novile as one harmonic among many produced by breaking the chart down the way a wave can be resolved into a series of numbered components, rather than as a division singled out for its own particular meaning from the outset.