Paranatellonta

Definition

Paranatellonta (Greek for "co-rising things") are the stars and constellations that rise at the same moment as a particular degree of the zodiac — the twelve-sign band of constellations the Sun appears to travel through — or alongside a particular decan, one of the 36 Egyptian star-groups that rose in sequence to mark the hours of the night. In Greco-Egyptian astrology, knowing which figure climbs the eastern horizon together with a given sign or decan added an extra layer of meaning to a chart.

In Tradition

Historians of astrology read the paranatellonta as a reception, not an Egyptian invention. The zodiac itself came from Babylon and was shaped into birth-chart astrology in Greek Alexandria. What Egypt supplied was long-recorded observation of which figures rise together — the extra-zodiacal forms carved on the Dendera and Esna temple ceilings — a substrate the doctrine drew on once Hellenistic astrologers systematized it.

In Practice

A Greco-Egyptian astrologer working a chart would note not just the rising sign but the figures co-rising with it, reading each as part of the moment's character. Belmonte and Lull point to the woman enthroned with a child below Leo on the Dendera ceiling: the astrologer Teucer of Babylon (whose "Babylon" some scholars place at Kheriaha near Heliopolis in Egypt, not the Mesopotamian city) construed her as Isis feeding Horus, rising as the paranatellon of the first decan of Virgo. Teucer also attached the twelve animals of the dodekaoros — a separate Greco-Egyptian scheme pairing one creature with each sign — to the signs as their co-rising stars, one of two competing ancient readings of those animals (the other treated them as hourly shapes of the Sun). Belmonte and Lull cite Quack's proposal that the co-rising idea has Egyptian antecedents reaching back to at least the 13th century BCE, with the doctrine later developed by Teucer and by Antiochus.

Historical Origin

The term is documented by Belmonte and Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt (2018, pp. 466-468), drawing on Boll (1903), Piperakis (2017), and Quack (1999, Sudhoffs Archiv 83) for the proposed Egyptian antecedent; the Teucer-of-Babylon attestations survive via excerpts made by Rhetorius (6th-7th c. CE). The dodekaoros reading is treated by von Lieven in Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science (2018, pp. 126-127).

Further Reading

• Juan Antonio Belmonte & José Lull, Astronomy of Ancient Egypt
• David Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science