Ingress Chart

IN-gres chart

Definition

An ingress chart is a horoscope cast for the exact moment the Sun enters one of the four cardinal signs — Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn — each of which opens an astronomical season. The four yearly ingress charts — Aries at the spring equinox, Cancer at the summer solstice, Libra at the autumn equinox, Capricorn at the winter solstice — are the backbone of mundane astrology, the branch that forecasts political, economic, weather, and social events. The chart is always cast for the particular place you want to read.

In Tradition

In Hellenistic, Arabic-Persian, medieval Latin, and modern Western mundane astrology, the ingress chart is treated as the founding chart for the season or the year ahead. Chris Brennan, in Hellenistic Astrology, covers the Hellenistic groundwork and the Aries ingress as the chart for the whole year; James Holden, in A History of Horoscopic Astrology, traces mundane practice through Manilius, Firmicus, Bonatti, and modern Western astrologers.

In Practice

You cast an ingress chart for the moment the Sun enters one of the four cardinal signs, calculated for the place whose public events you mean to read. The Aries ingress is the main chart for the year; some astrologers use it for the full twelve months, while others — following the Arabic-Persian and Bonatti tradition — start fresh at each later ingress. The modality of the rising sign conventionally sets how long the chart holds: a cardinal Ascendant covers only the next quarter, a fixed one the full year, a mutable one six months. The 10th house and its ruler stand for the head of state; the Ascendant and its ruler for the general population and the national mood; the Moon tracks shifts in public feeling; the IC, the bottom of the chart, stands for internal affairs. Eclipses near the chart's angles or its Sun and Moon set its themes going, and conjunctions of slow outer planets to its sensitive points carry mundane weight for years.

Historical Origin

The Aries-ingress technique is attested in Hellenistic mundane astrology — Vettius Valens, Firmicus Maternus' Mathesis IV-V, the Anonymous of 379 CE — and developed in Arabic-Persian and medieval Latin practice by Mashallah, Abu Ma'shar, and Bonatti, in the books of his Liber Astronomiae on revolutions of the years of the world. It continued in modern Western work with Charles E. O. Carter, Cecil Charles Maby, André Barbault, and Nicholas Campion. See Brennan's Hellenistic Astrology (2017) and Holden's A History of Horoscopic Astrology (2006).

Etymology

Origin: Latin. Meaning: From ingressus, "an entering," from ingredi, "to step into" (in- "into" + gradi "to step")..

Further Reading