Katarchic Astrology

kah-TAR-kik

greek: Καταρχή (Katarche)

Definition

Katarchic astrology is the Hellenistic Greek branch that reads the chart of a beginning — the moment a question is asked, an enterprise launched, an action set in motion. Its name comes from the Greek katarchē, "beginning, commencement." It is the parent of what later traditions split into two: horary, which interprets a moment that has already happened, and electional, which chooses a favorable future moment.

In Tradition

For Hellenistic astrologers, the katarchic chart stood alongside the birth chart as the second main kind of horoscope: one reads the life handed to you at birth, the other the life handed to an action at its start. Holden treats it as a natural extension of birth-chart practice: "Having devised the horoscope for natal astrology, it was obvious that it could also be used for the birth of an event or an action." The Greek treatises on katarchai ground the medieval horary and electional traditions.

In Practice

Today the word katarchic is mostly used as the historical and philosophical name for the single discipline behind both horary and elections. It is a handy term when you want to talk about the Greek roots of the doctrine, its passage through Dorotheus into Arabic, and the difference between answering a moment's question (horary) and choosing a future moment (electional). Practicing astrologers do not usually cast a separate "katarchic chart" — they cast a horary or electional chart and apply the inherited Greek-Arabic rules of significators, perfection, and impediment. Knowing the parent term explains why both branches lean on the same foundations.

Historical Origin

The Greek term katarchē, in its adjectival form katarchikē, appears in the Hellenistic technical literature and is treated at length in Dorotheus of Sidon's Carmen Astrologicum Book V (1st century CE), which survives largely through a 9th-century Arabic translation. Holden summarizes the discipline in A History of Horoscopic Astrology. It is the technical ancestor of the Arabic horary and electional treatises of Sahl ibn Bishr and Masha'allah (9th century) and of the medieval Latin compilations of Bonatti and Lilly.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading