Novile

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.

Forty degrees is a ninth of the circle, and the novile is the aspect that ninth defines. Like the other Keplerian additions it has no classical Western standing, since nine does not divide twelve and no pair of signs stands in a fixed novile relation to one another. It is measured in degrees or it is not found.

What distinguishes the novile from the septile and the quintile is that the number nine has independent weight in another living astrological tradition. In jyotisha the navamsha, the ninefold division of a sign into arcs of three degrees and twenty minutes, is among the most heavily used of all the divisional charts, second in importance only to the birth chart itself. The two techniques are not the same thing. The navamsha is a subdivision of a sign that generates a whole second chart; the novile is an angular relation between two planets. But they rest on the same division of the zodiac, and Western writers who defend the novile frequently point at the navamsha as evidence that a ninefold division of the circle is not an arbitrary invention.

That is an argument by analogy and it should be labelled as one. Jyotisha does not use a forty degree aspect, and its own aspect doctrine, the drishti, works on quite different principles. Western practice gives the novile a very narrow orb, often a single degree, and readings that turn on completion, gestation and things brought to term. As with the other minor aspects, the geometry is solid and the meaning is asserted.

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.