The novile is an aspect of forty degrees, formed by dividing the circle into nine equal parts. It is a minor aspect, not among the classical Ptolemaic set, and given a very narrow orb. Nine is three times three, and the tradition that uses the novile, drawing on the ninth-harmonic chart familiar from the Vedic navamsha, reads it as a relation connected to spiritual development, gestation, and the ripening of something toward completion, an inner rather than outer quality. It came into Western use chiefly through the harmonic and esoteric currents of modern astrology. These are the interpretive conventions of the astrological tradition for this angular relation, one of the subtler aspects derived from dividing the circle by nine, weaker in force than the major aspects but held by its users to carry a distinct spiritual significance.
The novile divides the circle into nine, a construction outside Ptolemy's original five and generally grouped with the harmonic aspects that received systematic treatment only after Kepler's Harmonices Mundi of 1619 argued that certain constructible divisions of the circle correspond to musical consonances capable of affecting events below the Moon. Nine is three times three, so the novile family sits in a numerological relationship to the trine, the aspect of one hundred and twenty degrees built on the number three, and some harmonic astrologers read the novile as a finer, more inward-turned echo of the trine's ease, concerned with the completion of a process already begun rather than with outward harmony. It is one of the aspects revived rather than newly discovered by twentieth century harmonic work, and its use remains confined largely to astrologers working explicitly in that tradition.