Abu Ma’shar

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Great Introduction and the Book of Religions and Dynasties.

Why the stars act

Abu Ma'shar builds astrology on the physics of Aristotle. The heavens are made of a fifth nature, neither hot nor cold, neither heavy nor light, which moves in a circle without beginning or end. The world below is made of the four elements, which come to be and pass away, and what moves them is the motion of the heavens. Each planet stirs the elements in its own way and by its own nature, and so the things of this world are born, grow, change and perish according to the motions above. The stars are causes and not only signs, and to study them is to study nature at its source.

His plainest proof is the sea. The tide rises as the Moon climbs from the eastern horizon toward the midheaven and falls as it sinks toward the west; it rises again as the Moon passes beneath the earth toward its lowest point, and falls as the Moon comes back up. The tides are greatest when the Moon is new or full and least at its quarters. If the Moon so plainly governs the waters, he argues, the heavens govern the rest of nature by the same kind of power.

The natures of the planets

Each planet has its nature from the four qualities. Saturn is cold and dry; Jupiter hot and moist, and temperate; Mars hot and dry to the point of burning; the Sun hot and dry; Venus cold and moist, and temperate; the Moon cold and moist; and Mercury changeable, taking the nature of whatever it joins. Jupiter and Venus are the greater and the lesser fortune, Saturn and Mars the greater and the lesser misfortune. The masculine and the feminine, the stars of the day and of the night, are set out in the same way, and from these natures every judgement begins.

The images that rise

Every sign is divided into three faces of ten degrees, and for each face he sets out the figures that rise with it as the Persians, the Indians and the Greeks drew the sky: men, beasts and things that come up over the horizon with that part of the zodiac. The astrologer who knows them sees not only the sign on the horizon but the whole picture of the heavens that rises with a degree, and reads a birth or a question by it.

The lots

A lot is a point found by taking the distance between two places in the chart and counting it out from the rising degree. Abu Ma'shar gives lots for every matter of life, for the father and the mother, brothers and children, marriage, sickness, travel, friends and enemies, and even for the prices of goods in the market, each made from the stars that signify that matter. The Lot of Fortune, made from the Sun and the Moon, is the first and greatest of them.

The great conjunctions

History moves with the meetings of the two highest planets. Saturn and Jupiter come together about every twenty years, and each meeting falls about two hundred and forty degrees on from the last, so that for about two hundred and forty years the meetings stay in the signs of one element, fire, earth, air or water, before they pass to the next. After all four, about nine hundred and sixty years, they return to the fiery signs and begin again.

Each kind of meeting signifies its own scale of change. The meeting every twenty years shows the fortunes of rulers and the events of the time. The passing of the meetings from one element to the next, the shift, shows the fall of dynasties and the rise of new kingdoms. The return to the fiery signs, the greatest of them, shows the coming of prophets and the rise and change of religions. The chart cast for the moment a cycle begins tells the nature of what it brings.

The revolution of the year

For each single year he casts a chart for the moment the Sun enters the first degree of Aries, the revolution of the year of the world. Its rising sign, the lord of the year and the places of the planets show what the year holds for kings and peoples: war or peace, plenty or dearth, rain, sickness and the prices of goods. The Sun's entry into the other three cardinal signs, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, adds the character of each season.

The years of a life

The same rule serves a single life. Each year, at the moment the Sun returns to the place it held at birth, a new chart is cast and judged together with the birth chart, with the sign the year has reached in its profection, and with the planet that rules that stretch of the life. For the life is divided into long periods ruled by the planets in turn. By day the Sun rules first, for ten years, then Venus for eight, Mercury thirteen, the Moon nine, Saturn eleven, Jupiter twelve and Mars seven, with three years for the Moon's north node and two for the south, seventy-five in all; by night the Moon begins the round.