Planetary picture

Meaning

A planetary picture (German Planetenbild) is a group of three or more factors in a chart that are linked by a single piece of arithmetic. The commonest kind is a planet standing on the midpoint of two others, either directly or by hard aspect. It is written

A/B = C

and read "A and B, with C on their midpoint", or "C equals A/B". For example Mars = Sun/Saturn means Mars is at, opposite, or square to the halfway point between the Sun and Saturn (the contacts that count depend on the dial being used). The picture is treated as one statement about all three factors together, not as three separate aspects. The two planets of the pair need not be in aspect to each other at all.

The same notation extends to four factors: A/B = C/D means two pairs share the same midpoint.

Writing a picture. Ebertin writes all the pairs that fall on one factor in a single line, such as Sun = Moon/Mercury = Moon/Pluto. Within each pair the faster-moving body comes first, which is the order used in his Combination of Stellar Influences and makes the entries easy to look up; the Sun is put before the Moon, and the Midheaven and Ascendant go last (p. 23) [6]. When he wants to show the contact, he puts the angle in the line, as in Sun-135-Moon/Pluto for a sesquiquadrate (p. 24) [6]. He calls a picture with the factor on the midpoint itself direct and one where the factor aspects the midpoint indirect (pp. 4, 24) [6]; other writers use these words differently (see midpoint).

Origin and history

The term and the method come from Alfred Witte and the Hamburg School. The school's rulebook, the Regelwerk für Planetenbilder ("Rules for Planetary Pictures"), first appeared in 1928 and was revised in later editions [1]. For Witte a planetary picture was any symmetry among the factors, of which the midpoint is only the simplest. The Hamburg School works with four kinds of calculation, half-sums, sums, differences and sensitive points, which give these forms [5]:

All of these are ways of saying the same thing about symmetry. If C is on the midpoint of A and B, then A and B are mirror images of each other around C, and A + B − C comes back to C (or, on the 90° dial, to a point square or opposite to it). The form A + B − C is the same shape of calculation as the ancient Lots: Ptolemy's Lot of Fortune is found by taking the distance from Sun to Moon and counting it from the Ascendant [3]. Witte's pictures also used the eight hypothetical planets of the Hamburg School and the Aries Point, the 0° of the cardinal signs (see Aries Point).

Reinhold Ebertin kept the idea of the planetary picture but narrowed its use. His cosmobiology dropped the hypothetical planets, and his Combination of Stellar Influences is built on the midpoint form A/B = C (together with the corresponding hard aspects): for pairs of factors it gives the meaning of the pair and then of a third factor that completes it [2]. The sums, differences and sensitive points remain chiefly Uranian tools. The midpoint form is the one in which most English readers meet planetary pictures, in Ebertin and in later reference books such as Munkasey's Midpoints [4].

Because Ebertin's and Witte's texts are interpretations, not calculations, they differ in wording; the arithmetic is the same.

How it is used

• Finding them. Every pair's midpoint is compared with every other factor. A picture exists when a factor falls within the orb, which for pictures is small. Ebertin allows 1½° in a birth chart and no more, calling 3° too large, though he tells readers to test such rules for themselves (pp. 23, 27) [6]; other writers use figures from about 1° to 2°.
• Which contacts. Conjunction, opposition and square in all schools. Ebertin and the 45° dial also count the semi-square (45°) and sesquiquadrate (135°); Ebertin gives all multiples of 45° about equal weight (p. 3) [6].
• Tightness. The closer the picture, the more weight it is given, so the tightest pictures are usually read first.
• Reading. The pair describes a combination of themes; the third factor shows where or through what that combination comes to expression. The pictures on one planet are gathered into a midpoint tree.
• Timing. A transiting or directed planet that reaches a natal midpoint "completes" a new picture for as long as it is within orb; Ebertin allows about 1° for this (pp. 69, 107) [6]. Uranian astrologers use the sensitive-point formula A + B − C to find degrees where such a completion will happen.

On this site. The Pictures view lists every C = A/B found within the chosen orb (0.5° to 3°, default 1.5°) on the chosen dial, tightest first. It shows the distance on the dial and, from the real angle, whether C is on, opposite, square to (or on the 45° and 22.5° dials, a semi-square, sesquiquadrate or other 22.5° step from) the midpoint. The site uses the midpoint form only; it does not compute Witte's sums, differences or sensitive points, and it does not use the hypothetical planets.

Examples

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879, 11:30 local mean time, Ulm), on the 90° dial with an orb of 1.5°, planets only. Seventeen pictures are found; the seven tightest are:

The same picture as a sensitive point. Uranus 151.29° + Neptune 37.87° − Saturn 4.19° = 184.97°, which is 4°58′ Libra. That is opposite Saturn (4°11′ Aries) within 0°47′: the sum form lands back on Saturn's axis, at twice the midpoint's distance, as the arithmetic predicts.

Four factors. The Mercury/Saturn midpoint (3°40′ Aries) and the Jupiter/Neptune midpoint (2°41′ Aries) are 0°59′ apart, a picture Mercury/Saturn = Jupiter/Neptune, in which Mercury also sits on Jupiter/Neptune.