Timing

The fuller picture

The method has two halves and they answer different questions. The number comes from measurement: take the distance between the two significators to the aspect that perfects the matter, and read the degrees as a count. Six and a bit degrees is six-ish units. The unit comes from placement: look at the quadruplicity of the sign the significator occupies and at the kind of house it sits in. Cardinal signs are quickest, mutable next, fixed slowest; angular houses are quickest, succedent next, cadent slowest. Put the two together and the grid gives you the unit that the count is counted in.

The standard grid is small enough to hold in your head. In an angular house: a cardinal sign gives days, a mutable sign weeks, a fixed sign months. In a succedent house the same three become weeks, months and years. In a cadent house, a cardinal sign gives months and a mutable sign years — and for a fixed sign in a cadent house the answer is that the timing cannot be had from the chart at all. That last cell is the most useful thing on the grid, because it is a refusal rather than a slow answer: the honest reading is that we do not know, often with the further sense that whatever it is will take a very long while. An older version of the same scheme, from Gadbury, leaves the whole cadent row blank, which amounts to saying longer than a week, longer than a month and longer than a year.

Two places the sources do not agree, and both are worth a reader knowing. The grid was tested against sixteen worked measures across three chapters of the source material and matched fifteen of them, which is a good record for a table this coarse. The exception is a mutable sign in an angular house, read in one chart as months where the grid says weeks, and no other reading of that chart rescues the discrepancy — so that single cell is the one place our grid and the source's own practice come apart. Separately, a passage on one narrow topic in the same book asserts an entirely different measure, taking the degrees between the significators and the benefics or the Sun, and claims to be the only way to do it, while two bullets earlier in the same block the timing is taken from the rising sign instead. That contradiction sits in the source. It has been recorded and has not been used to change anything.

Then there is the rule that matters more than the grid: where the literal unit is absurd against the question's own horizon, move it one step and say why. The worked case is a count of nine in a cardinal sign in an angular house, which reads literally as nine days. The question was about a twelve-month stretch, so it was read as nine months instead — and both landed, because a meeting turned up nine days later and the thing itself arrived on the longer measure. The rule is used three times across the source, once to demote a unit, once to demote two steps, and once to escape the cell that refuses to answer. So the grid is where the reading starts and the question can overrule it, provided the reasoning is stated out loud.

It is worth being blunt about what none of this promises. Symbolic timing gives a coarse quantity and a coarse unit, and it is open to a one-step revision by the shape of the question. Nothing in it distinguishes three weeks from twenty-five days, and nothing in it produces a date. The counting is looser than it looks, too — the worked examples in the source do not apply one consistent rounding: some round up to the next whole unit, at least one uses a half unit, and one reports fewer units than the whole degrees travelled. So read the number as approximate rather than counted. A different sort of estimate does exist, and it does give a date: search the real ephemeris forward for the moment the aspect actually goes exact. That answers a genuinely different question, though — when the geometry completes, which is not the same as when the event lands in somebody's life.