Choosing House Settings for Traditional and Horary Work

Before choosing houses for traditional or horary work in Hermes, identify the passage whose method you want to investigate and the moment your chart represents. Start with R when studying Lilly’s Regiomontanus calculation. Use B for a separate Alcabitius comparison. Record the author and passage alongside the setting so you can explain why you chose it.

Changing a birth chart from Placidus to Regiomontanus does not turn it into a horary chart. Horary requires a question, an accepted moment and a location. Once you have established those inputs, choose the house division used to examine them.

How do you separate birth data from question data?

A natal study starts with a birth moment and place. Horary, or question astrology, examines a particular question through a chart for the moment accepted by the method being followed. A person’s birth details and the details of their question belong to different records.

An R/B comparison using birth data remains a natal comparison. An R/B comparison using question data belongs to that question. Combining the two into a single exercise makes it harder to determine whether a difference comes from the house system or the changed time.

Keep revisions to the question visible too. If its wording becomes clearer later, date the clarification. Preserve which wording and data you examined rather than silently rewriting the original record.

Why cite your rule for question time and place?

In Christian Astrology, “Of the Time of Receiving any Question,” p.166, Lilly distinguishes asking a question from simply entering the astrologer’s home. His letter example separates delivery from opening it and grasping the questioner’s intention. This is Lilly’s stated approach. Accessible transcription, Book II, p.166.

A digital question can have different sending, delivery, opening and understanding times. State which one you use. Applying Lilly’s letter example to a messaging service is your methodological choice; the passage supplies no platform-specific rule for modern apps.

Document the location separately. If the questioner and reader are in different cities, selecting a time does not by itself identify the coordinates. Record the location convention of the source or teacher you follow. Do not make one participant’s city a universal rule without identifying the source you follow.

Three time fields help: the recorded local time, its UTC offset on that date, and the resulting UTC. For historical examples, investigate the calendar and the time convention as well. An old book’s afternoon time cannot simply be copied into a modern time zone and treated as an exact reconstruction.

What does Lilly’s Regiomontanus example establish?

Christian Astrology, Book III, Chapter CI, pp.519–523, explicitly demonstrates erecting a chart with Regiomontanus tables. The example is natal, so the method is not confined to horary. This provides evidence from the worked section itself, beyond the heading in the contents. Book III transcription, p.519 onward.

In Hermes, Regiomontanus, code R, is a starting point for examining that geometry. Reproducing an old chart also requires attention to its inputs. A modern calculation need not reproduce every rounding choice or intermediate operation in historical tables.

Ask two separate questions: “Which calculation does this author demonstrate?” and “Under which conditions do my inputs reproduce that example?” Answering the first does not settle the second. Investigate the calendar, time convention, coordinates and table precision before labelling a degree difference a software error.

The passage also cannot establish one house system for all traditional astrology. An author, work and purpose identify a method more precisely than a broad school label.

What changes between Regiomontanus, Alcabitius and Placidus?

These options appear in the same house menu, but construct intermediate boundaries through different geometries. A cusp here means the boundary at which a house begins.

The technical source for these brief definitions is Swiss Ephemeris, §§6.2.1, 6.2.3 and 6.2.11. Calling Alcabitius and Placidus “time-based” does not make them the same construction. Identify whose arc supplies the division.

Al-Qabisi’s Introduction to Astrology, Burnett–Yamamoto–Yano’s 2004 translation, Chapter I, p.46, discusses horizon/meridian quadrants and division related to the Ascendant’s rising times. It supplies a separate text for an Alcabitius study, without establishing one choice for all medieval practice. Library record of the book (Wellcome Collection).

Use the technical definition separately rather than deriving every detail of modern code B from that short historical paragraph. Apply the same discipline to other names: a historical reference does not establish complete equivalence with a modern implementation.

Why can a small cusp difference change your interpretation notes?

Consider a boundary crossing a sign edge. The following values are not outputs from two actual house systems. They have been selected solely to demonstrate a longitude boundary. Assume the neighbouring cusps enclose this region appropriately.

The cusps differ by 20 arcminutes. The planet remains at 120° in both columns: 10′ beyond the first boundary and 10′ short of the second. Changing the cusp sign changes its ruler. Here, domicile means a planet’s traditional sign rulership; it describes no physical movement.

Lilly assigns Cancer to the Moon and Leo to the Sun in Book I, Chapter XVIII, “The Use of the Table.” Explanation of the rulership table.

Keep another distinction in view: geometric placement and interpretive assignment are separate records. Lilly discusses proximity within 5° of a cusp in Book I, Chapter IV, p.33. The relevant passage. Being on the first-house side in our table does not necessarily mean that you would interpret the planet through the first house after applying such a rule.

Record both the calculated boundary and the proximity convention you apply. A house number displayed in Hermes is not evidence that it automatically applies Lilly’s 5° convention. Examining these traditional associations is also separate from establishing a verified prediction of an event.

How do you set up a comparison with one variable?

For an initial exercise, use 20 March 2000, 12:00:00 UTC; 41° north, 29° east; Gregorian calendar. Keep the question synthetic too: “Where should I look for my misplaced notebook?” This is not a real consultation or an event with a known outcome.

1. Identify the data. Record the accepted moment and coordinates. In the installed Horary flow, check which fields supply those inputs; merely changing a natal title is insufficient.
2. Record the R calculation. Take Sun/Moon and other relevant planetary longitudes, the Ascendant/Midheaven, and all twelve cusps.
3. Change only the house system to B. Retain time, place and other calculation choices. Make a separate comparison with P if useful.
4. Compare intermediate cusps. Record signs, degrees and arcminutes, marking any changed cusp ruler separately. Do not score the size of a difference as predictive success.
5. Add the interpretive rule separately. Keep your source’s cusp-proximity or ruler-selection convention distinct from the calculated values.
6. Run time sensitivity as a second exercise. Retain R and calculate again for 12:04 UTC. Do not mix that change with the R/B system difference in one comparison row.

Hermes outputs for these instants have not been calculated here. Leave degree fields in your observation table blank until you calculate them. Four minutes of clock time and four arcminutes are different units. House cusps cannot be assumed to move at a constant rate at every instant.

At high latitudes, record the system actually returned and any error or warning as well. The Swiss Ephemeris Programmer’s Manual, house-calculation section, describes a Porphyry fallback for Placidus/Koch under specified polar conditions. It does not establish which warning an installed Hermes interface displays.

What should you retain so you can reopen the study later?

Begin your notes with a readable source line such as “Lilly · Christian Astrology · II/p.166 for question time; III/CI for the Regiomontanus comparison.” Preserve the distinction between the jobs performed by those two passages.

Add the question, your reason for choosing its moment and location, the local-time/UTC conversion, calendar, calculation settings and program version. Keep planetary longitude, cusp, cusp ruler and interpretive convention in separate result fields. Using a personal settings slot does not mean you have also saved the question record or its rationale.

For the distinction between a personal preset, new-chart defaults and the data of an open chart, see the Hermes Chart Settings guide. When you return to your notes, you should be able to see which question and source method led you to choose R, as well as the setting itself.