waybread
Well-known member
I think that the warmest part of the day in most temperate regions is the Sun in the 9th house, not the 10th or 8th. The ancients accounted for seasonal lag with Leo, they could have accounted for the diurnal lag with the 9th house.
Our friends Ptolemy and Valens would have been intimately familiar with weather and climate patterns in and around Alexandria, Egypt. Ditto for the ancient Egyptians who probably invented the astrological houses--based on their lived experiences of their environments.
Although Egypt would have been labeled as part of the temperate zone by the Hellenists, Ptolemy was also a geographer. He would have understood differences between the climate of the Mediterranean perimeter, the interior of Europe, and the hot desert of the Near East.
Let's look at climate graphs for, say, Alexandria Egypt. The reason for the significant lag in peak daily temperatures immediatetely after 12:00 noon is because the earth is heated from the surface by re-radiation; not directly from incoming solar radiation. After the cool part of the night and early morning, it takes a while for the surface to warm up.
Let's look at the 3rd graph on this website, titled "Average hourly temperature": https://weatherspark.com/y/95917/Average-Weather-in-Alexandria-Egypt-Year-Round
We can see that the hot part of the day is from about 2:00 to 5:00 pm. If the MC symbolizes the highest point of the sun in the sky at noon, depending upon the time of year, the sun would be in the 8th house during the afternoon heat.
On a monthly basis the hot part of the year also happens in August, not at the summer solstice. At the time of the summer solstice, the northern hemisphere is still coming out of the cooler part of the year. I'm not sure how precession would figure into this, going back 2000 years.
Alexandria has a Mediterranean type of climate, with rainy winters and rainless summers. The rest of the country's climate qualifies as hot desert.
I've spent a lot of time in the Mojave and Utah deserts in the US, and the hot part of the day is definitely mid- to late-afternoon, notably in summer. Heat exhaustion, dehydration, and heat stroke are real dangers for the unprepared. The heat of the day can be a source of death to some. Cf. the Spanish siesta in the afternoon, where cities really come to life again after sundown.
As much as I prefer to distinguish between signs and houses, there is some evidence of one (of several) house systems that identified the houses' thematic contents with the zodiac signs. For example, the cadent third house is sometimes called the house of brothers. This bears little resemblance to the goddess or to the moon joying in the 3rd house, but it relates a lot to the third sign of Gemini.
I think we see something similar with the 8th house as the house of death and a relationship with scorpions.
This is an interesting article about the scorpion in ancient Egypt, and its death symbolism. The author is Egyptian: https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewco...&httpsredir=1&article=1136&context=euscorpius He talks about the scorpion goddess Serqet, who accompanies the dead.
Another example of the relationship between a (cadent) house meaning and the local environment is in Ptolemy, in sec. III.10 on length of life. Ptolemy mentions the 12th as the "House of the Evil Daemon," but ever the rationalist, he attributes the period just after sunrise has having "thick misty exhalation form the moisture of the earth" and atmospheric turbidity.
I spent a lot of time Googling "sunrise on the Nile," and came up with pictures like the following, which seem to bear him out.
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