condicio (condition)

kohn-DIK-ee-oh

latin: condicio / conditio

Definition

Condicio (also spelled conditio) is the Latin name for sect — whether a chart and its planets belong to day or night. It comes from the Latin verb seco, "to cut" or "divide," and it names the way the planets are cut into a day-team (Sun, Jupiter, Saturn) and a night-team (Moon, Venus, Mars), the same idea the Greeks called hairesis. Watch the spelling: it is not the everyday English word "condition," which means a planet's state in general — condicio means this one specific day/night classification.

In Tradition

In the medieval Latin texts, condicio is the term that carried the Greek doctrine of sect into Western traditional astrology. The astrologer Robert Hand brought the word back in his book Night and Day (1995). He used it for the in-sect state, and coined a paired term, extra conditione ("out of sect"), for the exact opposite — a debility the ancient writers describe but never give a name to.

In Practice

Astrologers working in the Latin-revival style use condicio for a planet's full sect-state, and extra conditione for its complete opposite: a day planet placed at night, below the horizon, in a night-aligned sign, in a night chart — or the mirror of that for a night planet. Hand argues this fully-out-of-sect state is the structural opposite of Hayz (the Arabic-derived term for a planet that matches its sect on every axis at once — sect, hemisphere, and the gender of its sign), and that it is a real weakening for the harder planets that the old delineations describe again and again without naming. Robert Zoller's Project Hindsight translation of the Liber Hermetis renders Latin condicio simply as "sect" throughout, and Zoller notes that the work "relies more heavily on sect (called condicio in the Latin) than in any other ancient or medieval text I am familiar with." So the word ties two threads together: the modern revival's technical vocabulary, and the medieval Latin texts that kept the doctrine alive.

Historical Origin

Latin condicio runs through the medieval Latin versions of Hellenistic astrological texts — most prominently the Liber Hermetis, edited and translated by Robert Zoller (Project Hindsight, 1998), where it consistently stands in for the Greek hairesis. Robert Hand revived the term in Night and Day: Planetary Sect in Astrology (Arhat Publications, 1995), where he introduced extra conditione as the name for the fully-out-of-sect debility.

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: A cutting, a division, an arrangement of conditions.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Etymology

Further Reading