Arabic Parts
Part of Necessity
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Origin 75 to 378 CE
A lot of Mercury, built on the Lot of Fortune, and read as constraint: obligation, necessity, the circumstances that cannot be argued with. It is the structural opposite of Eros in the Hermetic set, which is built on Spirit, what a person is drawn toward against what they are bound by. Its position inherits any dispute about how Fortune is calculated.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period75 to 378 CE 1Tradition: Hellenistic astrology in Greco-Roman Egypt Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account800 to 1300 CE 2Tradition: Arabic and Latin medieval astrology Place of Origin Origin of the Name"Arabic Parts" is a misnomer. These are the Hellenistic lots, Greek kleroi, already in use by Dorotheus, Vettius Valens and Paulus Alexandrinus centuries before any Arabic author. What the Arabic tradition did was multiply them and transmit them to Latin Europe 3 Learn More
The Lot of Necessity
The Lot of Necessity, kleros anankes, is the lot of Mercury in the Hermetic set, built on the Lot of Fortune and therefore on the side of circumstance rather than of will. Paulus Alexandrinus gives it for constraint, subordination, struggle and the conditions a person cannot argue with, and it stands in deliberate opposition to Eros: what one wants against what one must accept. The Greek ananke is a heavy word, the impersonal necessity that binds even the gods in some Greek thought, personified as a goddess in Orphic cosmology, and the choice of it for a lot is not casual. Later medieval and Renaissance handbooks reduced the lots to a long undifferentiated list of parts, and the structural opposition between Eros and Necessity, which is the point of both, tends to be lost in that presentation.
The day formula takes the arc from Mercury to Fortune and projects it from the Ascendant, Ascendant plus Fortune minus Mercury; by night the terms reverse, Ascendant plus Mercury minus Fortune. Necessity's construction from Fortune, rather than from Spirit as Eros is, is itself part of the opposition the two lots are read against each other: Eros, built on the mind's lot, measures what is wanted, while Necessity, built on the body's and circumstance's lot, measures what is imposed, and the choice of which principal lot each is built from is not arbitrary but encodes the very distinction the pair is meant to illustrate.
The Arithmetic of Necessity: Mercury, Sun and Moon Alone
The day formula stored for this lot is Ascendant plus Mercury minus the Lot of Fortune. Fortune by day is Ascendant plus Moon minus Sun, and substituting gives Ascendant plus Mercury minus Ascendant minus Moon plus Sun. The Ascendant cancels, leaving Mercury plus Sun minus Moon.
By day the Lot of Necessity contains no angle. It is built from three planetary longitudes, so it is indifferent to the place of birth and nearly indifferent to the hour.
How nearly depends mostly on the Moon, which is subtracted here and is by far the fastest term. The Moon covers about 13 degrees 11 minutes a day and the Sun about 59 minutes, while Mercury varies from about two degrees a day down through stationary to retrograde. The three together move the lot roughly eleven degrees a day in the ordinary case, which is about one degree every two and a quarter hours. A birth time wrong by two hours moves this lot by about a degree; the same error moves the Ascendant by thirty.
It is worth pausing on how counter-intuitive that is against the formula as written, which begins with the Ascendant and looks as time-critical as any other lot on the page. It is not, and an astrologer working from a rough birth time can use Necessity in a day chart with more confidence than almost anything else in the horoscope.
As with the other lots derived from Fortune, this reduction is specific to a day birth and must be redone for a night one.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Introduction to Astrology (Eisagogika)
Paulus Alexandrinus, 378the Lot of Necessity
2. Liber Astronomiae
Guido Bonatti, The Golden Hind Press, 1277on the parts, of which Bonatti lists some hundred and forty-fiveView the Source 3. A History of Western Astrology
Nicholas Campion, Continuum, 2009vol. 1, on the formation of horoscopic astrology in Greco-Roman EgyptView the Source Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Chris Brennan, Amor Fati Publications, 2017On the lots, the Hermetic seven, and sectQuote, On the lots, the Hermetic seven, and sect
Modern secondary treatment of the Greek lot doctrine and of the argument over reversal.
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