Part of Father

The Lot of the Father is taken from Saturn and the Sun, the two natural significators of the father in this tradition, Saturn as the general significator of the elder and the Sun as the significator of the father by day. The doubling is the source of the confusion: some authorities reverse the order of the two, and some apply a sect reversal while others do not, so published formulae differ. The underlying doctrine, that Saturn signifies the father, is old and is stated by Ptolemy, who assigns the father to the Sun and Saturn and the mother to the Moon and Venus; the lots simply give that doctrine a point in the chart. Modern practice more often reads the fourth house or the tenth for the father, and the lots of the family members are little used outside traditional circles.

Medieval sources agree that the Lot of the Father is built from Saturn and the Sun but differ, as with the Lot of Children, on the direction of the arc and on whether the sect reversal that governs the Hellenistic lots proper is applied to it at all; some medieval compilers, working after the Hellenistic sect doctrine had weakened in transmission, treat the family lots as fixed formulas independent of day or night birth, which if correct would mark a real break from the sect-sensitive construction of the seven principal Hermetic lots above. This shift, if it is one, is itself a useful marker of how much technical apparatus was lost or simplified between the Hellenistic period and the medieval Arabic and Latin reception of the lots.

The day formula stored for this lot is Ascendant plus Saturn minus the Sun. It is a plain construction with no lot inside it, so there is no cancellation to find and no doubled Ascendant to warn about.

The motion is almost exactly the Ascendant's, slowed very slightly. Saturn adds about two minutes of arc a day and the Sun subtracts about 59, so the lot travels about 359 degrees a day against the Ascendant's 360. In practice it advances one degree every four minutes, and a birth time in doubt by an hour leaves the sign in doubt.

The interesting feature is which planet does which job. Saturn is the classical significator of the father and it is the added term, while the Sun, which in the Hellenistic scheme is the day-sect significator of the father, is the subtracted one. The lot is therefore built out of the arc from the Sun to Saturn, projected from the horizon: the distance between the two bodies that both stand for the father in different parts of the doctrine.

Because both of those bodies are also sect-sensitive, the night formula reverses them and the lot becomes the arc from Saturn to the Sun instead, which places it on the opposite side of the Ascendant by the same amount. For a chart cast near dawn or dusk, where the sect is genuinely in question, the two answers can be a long way apart and the sect determination has to be settled before the lot is reported at all.