Genethlialogy

jen-eth-lee-AL-o-jee

greek: γενεθλιαλογία (Genethlialogia)

Definition

Genethlialogy (Greek genethlialogia, the "study of nativities") is the branch of Hellenistic astrology built around the birth chart — looking at where the planets stood at the moment someone was born to read the nature and course of their life. The name comes from genethlios, "to do with one's birth." It is one of the formal branches of the discipline, set apart from universal (mundane) astrology and from inceptional astrology. Practitioners who specialized in it were sometimes called genethlialogoi, "nativity-studiers."

In Tradition

In the Hellenistic scheme, genethlialogy is treated as the main and most developed branch of astrology — the one built around the individual's birth chart rather than around collective or worldly events. Its rise marks one of the great shifts that separates Hellenistic astrology from the earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian omen traditions, which were chiefly concerned with the fate of the king and the land rather than the private person.

In Practice

Genethlialogy is the heading under which all natal work falls: when an astrologer casts and reads a chart for a person's birth moment, they are doing genethlialogy, as distinct from inceptional (katarchic) or universal astrology. In practice the branch holds the whole toolkit of natal technique — casting the chart from the birth time and place, assigning the twelve places, reading the planets by sign, place, and condition, working out rulerships and sect, the Lots, and the time-lord methods that spread the chart's significations across a life. Hellenistic surveys of the field, and modern reconstructions, use the threefold genethlialogy / katarche / universal division to sort which technique belongs where: length-of-life, character, and life-direction methods are genethlialogical, while election and horary methods are inceptional. Naming the branch is, in effect, a way of declaring the question being asked of the chart — a question about a born person's life taken as a whole.

Historical Origin

Genethlialogy is the classicist and Hellenistic term for natal astrology, attested across the Greek technical literature. Tamsyn Barton's Ancient Astrology (1994) glosses it as natal astrology and treats it as the dominant kind of Greco-Roman practice. David Pingree's From Astral Omens to Astrology traces the shift from the king-centred Mesopotamian omen tradition to the individual-centred genethlialogy of the Hellenistic world. Chris Brennan presents it as the first of the three branches of Hellenistic astrology.

Etymology

Origin: Greek. Meaning: The study of nativities.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Etymology

Further Reading