Angle and History

The novile, sometimes called the nonile, comes from the ninefold division of the circle and belongs to the harmonic aspects developed in modern Western astrology, its adoption credited chiefly to John Addey (1920 to 1982) and the method he set out in Harmonics in Astrology in 1976, which read a chart for whichever numerical divisions of the circle proved significant rather than confining analysis to the twelvefold zodiac and the angles Kepler had already added to it. It has no standard glyph of its own and was not among the aspects given a dedicated codepoint in the Unicode Standard; it is written with the letter N or with the digit nine, varying by program and publisher in the same way as the quintile and the septile.

The number nine carries independent weight in Indian astrology through the navamsa division, a technique concerned with subdividing signs rather than with aspects between bodies, so the coincidence of number should be read as parallel rather than as one tradition borrowing from the other. Addey's own background was in the Western harmonic method he developed from the nineteen fifties onward, published fully only in 1976, late in a career that had begun decades earlier with more conventional astrological research, and the novile's ninefold count is best understood as one product of that general method rather than as an idea he took over from Indian practice.