astrology-traditions/0.3 · released 2026-08-18

Astrology traditions

Astrology is not recorded here as one body of knowledge. It is recorded as named interpretive traditions, each with its own sources, techniques, and disagreements. Every rule declares the tradition it belongs to, because a rule detached from its tradition belongs to none of them.

The epistemic boundary

Every rule in this layer is recorded as unvalidated tradition. That status is fixed in the schema and cannot be raised. This layer claims that a passage has been transcribed accurately from a named source. It does not claim, and cannot express, that any rule predicts anything.

Provenance quality and empirical support are recorded on separate axes precisely so that a rule can be well-sourced and unsupported at the same time. Appearing in a respected old text is a fact about the text, not evidence about the world.

Prohibited uses

These apply to every rule in the registry without exception, and no generated report may produce them.

  • medical diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment decisions
  • legal conclusions or advice
  • investment, trading, or other financial decisions
  • predictions of death, disaster, or pregnancy outcomes
  • claims that a chart determines personality, capability, or behaviour
  • guarantees about future events
  • high-stakes decisions taken on astrological grounds alone
  • employment, lending, insurance, or housing decisions about a person

Cross-family answer graph · 36 questions

Route a question to the right kind of authority

Practical answers connect calculation, timing, coordinate frames, interpretive traditions, and empirical testing while preserving the boundary between them.

Operational layer · 36 worked protocols

Execute inputs, calculations, evaluation, and comparison without hidden defaults

Each protocol names required inputs, ordered operations, emitted artifacts, refusal conditions, completion tests, and—where applicable—a recomputable calculation receipt.

The reference library documents time resolution, ephemerides, frames, zodiac conversions, houses, lunar limbs, aspects, uncertainty, and provenance. These longer guides connect those contracts to complete report methods.

Calculation authority library · 42 references

Every number needs a declared convention

Inspect required inputs, procedures, production status, uncertainty behavior, authoritative sources, and the exact boundary between geometry and interpretation.

Timing reference library · 36 canonical pages

Ingresses, stations, lunations, and Vimśottarī chronology

Inspect event definitions, root-finding procedures, frame choices, repeated crossings, period boundaries, uncertainty, source roles, and the exact limit on what each date can support.

Corporate and mundane library · 30 finite pages

Formation, transaction, deployment, launch, and merger events

Inspect evidence requirements, event-selection rules, location and time uncertainty, organization-specific geometry, preregistration methods, and sanitized system demonstrations.

Traditions

4 registered · 125 rules

tropical15 rules

Hellenistic (Ptolemaic)

2nd century CE, transmitted through Arabic and Latin commentary

The system set out in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, which grounds planetary signification in the four elemental qualities and treats the zodiac as measured from the equinox. It is the transmission route for much later Western practice, and it is not identical to any of them.

tropical0 rules

Horary (Lilly)

17th-century England

The question-based practice codified in William Lilly’s Christian Astrology, which judges a chart cast for the moment a question is understood rather than for a birth.

No rules published: No rights-cleared, proofread transcription of the 1647 text is available. The source is public domain, but every machine transcription found is unproofread OCR; publishing rules from it would violate this layer’s transcription-fidelity claim.

sidereal110 rules

Vedic (Jyotiṣa)

classical Indian, transmitted continuously to present practice

The Indian sidereal system represented here by a deliberately small source-bound corpus. Its calendrical arithmetic is reproducible; every newly encoded natal, timing, mundane, or corporate interpretation remains withheld until passage fidelity and rule formalization receive scoped practitioner review.

sidereal0 rules

Western sidereal

20th century onward

Western practice that measures the zodiac against the fixed stars rather than the equinox. Registered here to make the frame disagreement explicit: a sidereal rule and a tropical rule that use the same sign name do not refer to the same region of sky.

No rules published: The relevant modern Western sidereal sources are in copyright. No rule will be encoded until a licence permits passage-level quotation and formalization.

Sources

Only rights-cleared editions may carry excerpts. Passages are transcribed verbatim and bounded; where an edition differs from others, the difference is recorded rather than silently corrected.

  1. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, or Quadripartite · Claudius Ptolemy, tr. J. M. Ashmand · composed circa 2nd century CE · Project Gutenberg eBook #70850, from the 1822 Ashmand translation

    public-domainThe 1822 Ashmand translation is out of copyright, and the Project Gutenberg transcription is distributed without restriction in the United States.

  2. The Bṛhat Saṃhitā of Varāha Mihira · Varāhamihira, tr. N. Chidambaram Iyer · composed circa 6th century CE · 1884 English translation, proofread transcription published by wisdomlib.org

    public-domainThe 1884 Chidambaram Iyer translation is out of copyright. Transcribed from the proofread wisdomlib presentation rather than the Internet Archive scan, whose OCR renders the English as Devanagari mojibake and is unusable for verbatim quotation.

  3. The Bṛhat Jātaka of Varāha Mihira · Varāhamihira, tr. N. Chidambaram Iyer · composed circa 6th century CE · Foster Press, Madras, 1885; Wellcome Collection scan

    public-domainWellcome Collection marks this 1885 edition Public Domain. Passages were checked against page images in its scan; machine OCR was used only to locate candidates and is not treated as authoritative text.

  4. Christian Astrology · William Lilly · composed 1647 · Internet Archive scans of the 1647 and 1659 printings

    public-domainThe 1647 text is out of copyright. No passages are transcribed here: the available machine transcriptions are unproofread OCR of 17th-century typography, and quoting them would introduce corruption into a layer whose only claim is transcription fidelity.

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