Part of Fortune Calculation

After I added Part of Fortune to iPhemeris I began getting emails from users complaining that their “Part of Fortune was wrong”. It was rather annoying and demonstrated that many do not do their homework, and simply use the tools without really understanding the why’s and wherefore’s. Here’s hoping I can get people sorted out on this….

The history of the Part of Fortune is really quite interesting and the calculation commonly considered correct is a perfect example of an error in translation becoming a fact!

The Part of Fortune is one of the Arabic Parts, which are quite old and according to this WikiPedia article date back to Pre-Hellenistic times. How old they really are is not clear and cannot be proven by conventional means, but all good students of the Ageless Wiz, know that Astrology is very, very, very ancient indeed (probably as old as humanity itself) and that certain schools of Astrologers in India, claim to have written records of their Astrological observations going back over 100,000 years!

Göbekli Tepe

Personally I don’t doubt them, and of course dead brained academics think that is ridiculous, but what do they know! Most of them still say we were running around in tiger skins a mere 7 or 8,000 years ago…. Then we found Göbekli Tepe  which has been carbon dated to at least 12,000 years ago, with other un-excavated parts thought to be possibly 15,000 years old.

Or Gunung Padang which is thought to be much, much older (possibly 30 or 40,000 years old) by the native archeologists who are excavating, as well as one of my personal hero’s Dr. Robert M. Schoch.

Gunung Padang

Or, there is the zodiac carved on the ceiling at the Egyptian Temple of Dendera showing the position of Virgo in 3 separate locations, implying that Egyptian Astrologers had observed at least 3 complete Precession cycles, or an  observational history of approximate 3 x 25,860 = 77,580 years!

Dendera Zodiac

And then there is Easter Island, the grand Daddy of them all which HP Blavatsky tells us was under the ocean and came back up and is very, very old indeed. I found it rather humorous when I recently read that some brilliant archeologists are only now getting around to excavating one of these so called “heads”, and finding they also have bodies! Bodies which are approximately 35 feet high and which are covered by layers (strata) of earth implying a much, much, much older age. Wow! It took until now to dig one of these up and to realize that they, like the ones standing on platforms, had full bodies?! I would have been all over that first thing. Once more HPB is proven right, again!

Easter Island

So, all I have to say is “oopsie” guess people were doing a little more than clubbing things over the head with bones in Pre-Hellenistic times and that it is a fair bet that Astrology and the Part of Fortune is really, really old! Besides, there are parts of the world where people STILL run around in tiger skins clubbing things. I live in one… it’s called New York! So why should anyone think that is proof of the age of humanity?!

But I digress… back to the main point: the Part (or lot) of Fortune Calculation:

The Part of Fortune Calculation

By convention the Astrological Parts or Lots are often referred to as the Arabic Parts, but in point of fact are older than the Arabic civilizations which most likely got them from the far east or Egypt or both. We know they are much older because the Greeks talked about some of them (many of whom studied and got what they knew and taught in the Egyptian & Indian Mystery schools), as did the Vedic astrologers. And that these so called Arabic Parts, only became attributed to Arab astrologers by more recent European astrologers emerging from the  intellectual stupidity and repression imposed on them by the Holy Roman Empire during the dark ages.

As one often sees with all the translation and re-translation from one language to another, errors crept in and certain prominent European astrologers came to believe that Ptolemy used the same Part of Fortune calculation for day and night births. Why they thought this given that most other early Greek and Roman astrologers didn’t, is not clear… but they did. And after centuries of a classical game of telephone we now have many people operating under a misconception about what the correct Part of Fortune calculation is, and where “their Part of Fortune” should be.

However, more recent translations of Ptolemy, as well as some of his commentators, clearly indicates that he did not advocate a single formula and did in fact follow the convention used by most other ancient astrologers, which was to use different calculations for day/night births.

For this reason, when I was adding Part of Fortune to iPhemeris I decided to not continue to perpetuate the misconception and provided only the different for day and night birth algorithms. And for which I was of course taken to the wood shed.

After much haranguing, I relented (something I perhaps should not have done and will not likely do again) and added an option to alternatively use the wrong calculation if one so chooses. People are now free to wallow in their ignorance if they wish… or they might read this and learn more and move into the light?!

The Correct Part of Fortune Calculation

Day births occurr when the sun is above the Ascendant/Descendant line, and Night births when it is below. To correctly calculate the Part of Fortune, as done by the Ancients, one does the following:

• The Part of Fortune for Day Births = Ascendant + Moon – Sun.
• The Part of Fortune for Night Births = Ascendant + Sun – Moon.

Welcome to the light,
iPhemeris