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In this Book, Morin explains the
various classifications and subdivisions of the Signs and gives his opinion
as to why some of them should be changed or rejected altogether. He gives
what seems to him to be logical reasons for these features of the Zodiac.
And as usual he quotes Holy Scripture from time to time. We should be aware
that he was also primarily motivated by two things in astrology: (1) a
dislike of anything that did not have a definite relationship to astronomy;
and (2) a distrust of anything that seemed to him to have been originated
by Arabian astrologers.
Unfortunately, Morin's knowledge of
the history of the World and the history of astrology, while consistent
with what his 17th century contemporaries believed, was inferior to our
knowledge today. Therefore, some of his “proofs” are no longer valid. And
some of the subdivisions of the Zodiac that he discusses have fallen out of
use and are hardly even known to modern astrologers. Still, his
observations and comments are interesting, displaying as always his
determination to put every facet of astrology on a logical basis. And
unlike the majority of astrological writers, he does not simply enunciate a
rule, but he also gives an explanation of why he believes it to be valid.
In Chapter 1 Morin resumes his
argument that the signs are the same both above and below the equator. And
we are surprised to learn that he held a mistaken idea of how to calculate
house cusps for places in the southern hemisphere. In the examples that he
gives, he has simply taken the house cusps from the House Tables as if the
Southern latitude was Northern latitude, which is of course incorrect. The
proper procedure is to add 180 degrees to the RAMC and then copy the degree
numbers of the cusps but reverse the Signs shown with them in the table.
However, since he apparently only had two horoscopes of persons born in the
southern hemisphere, this error did not affect his practice of astrology in
Paris. It
seems that he was so intent upon asserting that the Zodiacal Signs were not
reversed below the equator, as some astrologers had suggested, that he was
reluctant to change the procedure for using the House Tables, since that
would imply that there was something different about astrology in the
southern hemisphere.
In order to make my translation of
Morin's text easier to comprehend, I have italicized a number of technical
terms. And I have broken up some of his long sentences into shorter ones. I
have also added some words in parentheses, since he sometimes speaks rather
shortly, especially towards the ends of sentences. And I have added some
footnotes either to clarify the text or to provide my own comments.
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