Stake

STAYK

arabic: وَتَد (watad) · greek: κέντρον (kentron) · latin: cardo

Definition

"Stake" is the English word Benjamin N. Dykes uses for the Arabic term watad — literally a "tent-peg" — found in the Arabic-Persian works of ʿUmar al-Ṭabarī, Abū ʿAlī al-Khayyāṭ, and Sahl ibn Bishr. It means the same as the Greek kentron ("pivot") and the medieval-Latin cardo or angulus: the four pivotal places of the chart — the Ascendant (1st house), the Imum Coeli (4th, "the stake of the earth"), the Descendant (7th), and the Midheaven (10th).

In Tradition

In the Dorothean and Arabic-Persian tradition the stakes are the four strongest positions in a chart: a planet in one has its indications amplified, for good or ill. ʿUmar al-Ṭabarī reads the triplicity-lords of the Ascendant in the stakes as the decisive signs of how someone is raised; Sahl uses "the lord of the question is in a stake" as a standard horary test of strength. Dykes keeps the word "stake," not kentron or cardo, to render the Arabic watad.

In Practice

Working with the medieval Arabic-Persian-Latin sources, you identify the four stakes — the Ascendant, the IC ("the stake of the earth"), the Descendant, and the MC — and treat them as the foremost positions of strength for any planet, lot, or significator. In the triplicity-lord-in-stake doctrine, the three triplicity rulers of the Ascendant's sign are spread across the three thirds of life — early, middle, and late — and read for upbringing, mid-life, and old age, with each lord judged mainly by whether it falls in a stake or in a succedent or cadent place. In horary, the question's significator landing in a stake means the matter has the angular strength to come about; a cadent placement means weakness. The ʿUmar-Sahl-Bonatti reception adds a topical rule: a stake also takes on the meanings of its house — 1st for the body, 4th for home and ancestry, 7th for the partner, 10th for vocation. Dykes's "stake of the earth" keeps the Arabic watad al-arḍ for the IC, marking it off from the plain Latin "fourth house."

Historical Origin

The stake is attested across the medieval Arabic-Persian astrological corpus — in Dorotheus' Carmen Astrologicum (1st-century-CE Greek, surviving in 8th-century Pahlavi via a 9th-century Arabic translation), ʿUmar al-Ṭabarī (9th century), Sahl ibn Bishr (9th century), Abū ʿAlī al-Khayyāṭ (9th century), Masha'allah, and Hugo of Santalla's 12th-century Latin translation of the Book of Aristotle, which renders watad as cardo. Modern critical treatments are Benjamin N. Dykes's editions of Carmen Astrologicum (2017) and Persian Nativities (Vols I-III, 2009-2010).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading