|
J. B. Morin, M.D. (1583- 1656) worked for 30 years on his massive
Astrologia Gallica (French astrology) but did not live to see it in print.
lts posthumous publication at The Hague in
1661 was subsidized by Queen Maric Louise of Poland (161 1-1667), a grateful
former client. The main text of the Astrologia Gallica fills 784
double-columned folio pages. It has approximately 548,000 Latin words,
which translated into English would amount to approximately 995,000 words-a
truly massive book! By way of comparison, the English Bible, contains about
775,000 words. The Astrologia Gallica is divided into 26 books. The first
12 are mainly concerned with philosophical and religious considerations. Books
13-26 cover the several branches of astrology in great detail.
Since the Astrologia Gallica is so extensive, it has never been
fully translated into any modern language. After 240 years, Book 21 on
Determinations was translated into French by the French revival astrologer
Henri Selva (1861-1952). This was the book that first called the modern
astrological public's attention to the Morin method. In effect, it launched
the modern study of the Morin method of interpretation. Nothing more
appeared until 1941 , when Jean Hieroz (b. 1889) published a manual on the
Morin method of horoscope interpretation's and an that same year he
published a translation of the latter half of Book 26 on Horary Astrology
and Elections, followed in 1943 by a compilation of short biographical
passages from the AG under the title Ma
vie devant les astres (My Life before the Stars), and in 1946 he
published what he called a complete French translation of Book 25. Hieroz
was a well-known French astrologer who had studied with Selva.
The first English translations from the Astrologia Gallica
were published in 1974, when two independent
translations of Book 21 appeared. Then, after another 20 years, more
English translations began to
appear. First, Book 22 on Primary Directions (with excerpts from Books 2,
13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 23, and 24) followed by Book 23 on Revolutions, Book 18
on the Strengths of the Planets, Book 24 on Progressions and Transits,
Books 13-15 and Book 19, Book 16 on Rays and Aspects, and Book 17 on the Astrological
Houses. So far as I am aware, no
other parts of the urological Houses of Astrologia
Gallica have been published in English.
The French translations of Books 21 on Determinations, Book 25 on
Mundane Astrology, and the latter portion of Book 26 dealing with Elections
may still be available in reprints.
Despite Hieroz's assertion, his translation of Book 25 is not complete
and it often resorts to paraphrase and to his own explanations interpolated
into the translation. However, I have some times benefited from his
rendering of the Latin. At the end of his translation he has added a
Summary of Morin's rules, his account of Offusius's rules, examples of the
application of Morin's rules to predicting the outbreak of World War 11,
and Morin's Tables for calculating Solar returns.
At the end of my translation, I have added translations of Hieroz's
statement of Offusius's rules, and his discussion of the World War II
charts. I have also added a few Mundane charts for the year 1914 as a
convenience to students, an appendix containing a Table of the Equation of
Time, an Index of Persons, and a Bibliography.
In 1996, having temporarily mislaid my photocopy of the Astrologia Gallica, 1 translated
Hieroz's French version of Book 25 and its appendices, and at the request
of Kris Brandt Riske, Librarian of the American Federation of Astrologers,
I later supplied some excepts from my translation. These dealt mainly with
the prediction of the weather. l had originally intended to publish my
English version of Hieroz's French translation, but a decade later on
comparing it with the Latin text, and noticing the numerous discrepancies
mentioned above, I decided to translate Book 25 directly from the Latin
original, and that is what you have here.
Some Remarks about Book 25
It might be helpful to the reader who is not familiar with the Astrologia Gallica to mention that Morin
makes frequent use of some of his own technical terms, in particular the
term determinations. This term
describes his theory of the facets of a person's life or the field of
activity in which a Planet will be active in a particular horoscope or
mundane chart. The main criterion is the house position of the planet, e.g.
a planet in the 2nd house is primarily determined to money matters, but its
house rulerships, and its aspects to other Planets also have an influence.
Two other distinctive terms are celestial
state and terrestrial state. Celestial state describes the
universal influences arising from a Planet's sign position and its aspects;
these influences are viewed as being descriptive of the planet's potential
influence at a given moment. Terrestrial
state refers to a Planet's house position in a particular chart, which
establishes the determination and
also the strength of the planet, which depends on the house's relation-
ship to the angles-angular houses being strong, succulent houses middling,
and cadent houses weak.
Morin also consistently uses the older term revolution where we would speak of ingresses or solar or lunar
or planetary returns, and he uses
the word universal where we would
use mundane. In this book he very
frequently uses the term universal
constitution, which means what we would call a mundane chart, i.e. a chart drawn to make predictions for a
region rather than for an individual - the commonest example is the annual
Aries Ingress chart, but the chart of a Mars-Saturn conjunction would be
another example. And occasionally he uses the term constitution to refer to a natal chart.
He also frequently speaks of synods,
ice. conjunctions, and syzygies,
which can be either conjunctions or oppositions (and sometimes squares or
even trines). I have usually retained these terms. And I have also kept the
Latin word Caelum to refer to the
configuration of the celestial sphere at a given moment, rather than
translate it as sky or heaven.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that while Morin's theory of
interpreting Aries Ingress charts seems sound, his own experience with such
charts is now known to have been misleading. The Rudolphine Tables that
became available in 1627 had a cyclic error in the Sun's longitude that
amounted to about 0°07 '30 '' at the equinoxes (but only about 0°00'20"
at the solstices). This caused the tabular
time of an Aries Ingress to be about 3 hours early and the tabular time of
the Libra Ingress to be about 3 hours late, while the times of the Cancer
and Capricorn Ingresses were only off by 10 or 15 minutes.
Hence, every single Aries Ingress chart that Morin (or any other
astrologer of his day) ever drew and considered was 3 hours off and
consequently had the wrong ASC and MC (as well as the wrong house
positions)!
In Part 1, Chapter 2, Morin gives a table of the times of the Solar
Ingresses for the year 1600 as calculated from the Rudolphine Tables are shown in the following table with the
times reduced to Greenwich, the solar longitudes calculated for those times
from modern theory, and the error of the older tables in the time of the
Ingress in hours and minutes.
|
|
Uraniborg
LMT
|
Greenwich
UT
|
Longitude
|
Time
Error
|
|
Aries
Ingress
|
20 Mar 1600
06:31:50 AM
|
05:41:02
|
359°52.5
|
-3:03
|
|
Cancer
Ingress
|
21 Jun 1600
10:31:16 AM
|
09:40:28
|
89°59.6
|
-0:1 1
|
|
Libra
Ingress
|
23 Sep 1600
0:53:32 AM
|
02:02:44
|
180°07.0
|
+2:49
|
|
Capricorn
Ingress
|
21 Dec 1600
1:26:20 AM
|
10:35:32
|
269°59.5
|
-0:14 1
|
Prior to 1617, when Kepler began to publish ephemerides that
probably anticipated the positions (at least for the Sun) that could later
be calculated from his Rudolphine
Tables, the available ephemerides were even more in error. The sad
truth is that no Aries Ingress calculated by any astrologer anywhere before
that time was accurate, because the astronomers had been unable to produce
ephemerides of the Sun that were accurate to within 1 minute of arc. Astrologers had almost universally trusted
the tables and ephemerides prepared by astronomers, and the astronomers had
let them down with their faulty solar theories!
|