Divinity Atlas

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What an Edition Does That an Author Does Not

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What an Edition Does That an Author Does Not

The interesting thing about this book is what printing did to it. A manuscript circulating among a few practitioners varies from copy to copy, and no two readers are certainly working from the same text. A printed edition produces hundreds of identical copies, so that everyone consulting the degree images afterwards is consulting the same images in the same order, and the variation that had been normal in the tradition stops. Angelus contribution was the edition, and the edition is what mattered.

The genre continued, and the atlas has to be careful about how the later members relate to it. In 1898 the Welsh astrologer Charubel published a set of symbolic readings for every degree, obtained by his own method rather than compiled from earlier books. In the twentieth century a further and much better known set of degree symbols was produced in California by an entirely separate process and has its own entry in this atlas. All three are degree image systems and none of the later ones is a revision of the earlier. Resemblance of genre is not descent, and treating a family of similar projects as a single transmitted tradition is one of the commonest errors in the history of astrology.

The manuscript question stays open. Which earlier compilations fed the 1488 text, in what order, and how much the editor or the printer altered on the way, would be settled by collating the surviving manuscripts against the printed book, and that work is not available in a form this atlas can cite. It is recorded here as an open question rather than passed over, and carries a matching entry in the atlas register of unresolved questions.

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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.