The excerpts were saying many things, related to different parts of our exchange. I'm not gonna copy-paste anything, and I won't waste other 30 minutes of my time to answer this thread anymore in the future, although I really enjoy you people, because I'm really tired.
So please, pay attention if you really want to know why I think what, I'll cover it all, or try to.
moonris3, it's not that we don't understand your house=sign conflation. It's pretty simple. We just disagree with it.
Given that we don't really know when the first 12 houses divisions occurred, we know that, shortly after Ptolemy, Porphyry started using them. The Placidus system was initially thought to be the system used by Ptolemy during his times, but this hypothesis has received more disaccord than consent.
Houses were in place at least in the century prior to Ptolemy: see Manilius and Dorotheus. Vettius Valens, Ptolemy's contemporary, used them.
Whole signs was probably the earliest system used, but a quadrant system named for Porphyry was also known in late Antiquity. I haven't seen any good evidence of Placidus being used in Antiquity. This is one system that really depends on an accurate birth time, which was hard to do prior to better time-keeping inventions. There is zero evidence that Ptolemy used Placidus houses-- or any house system, for that matter.
Ptolemy's contribution to all the following astrological practice is indisputable, Porphyry himself wrote the prefaces to Ptolemy's volumes, and we're still using some of his archaic concepts in the XXI century. For this, I see nothing so weird about quoting Ptolemy in an astrology forum.
I don't think it's weird whatsoever. I'm delighted that you're exploring Ptolemy's work.
Ptolemy was the great astronomer and astrologer who revolutionized a good part of our recorded history with his ideas, he wrote the Tetrabiblos, the book I had fun quoting. What is the Tetrabiblos about?, why is it so important?
It is a masterpiece for us astrologers because for the first time an astrologer collected all the previous knowledges about the stars, and put order into them. We in here know that Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos is his mathematical, Hipparchian, interpretation of the older Chaldean and Egyptian traditions. He didn't write anything new, but revisited many things. Ptolemy pushes himself, in his selections, to the point of omitting and even criticize many back then traditionally accepted astrological theories, both Egyptian and babylonian; because to him astrology had to follow scientific, mathematical rules. If you couldn't apply those rules then such theories had no reason to exist. He even pushes himself to the point of accusing false astrologers and magic practitioners, who'd just put in a bad light the scientific astrological practice.
Ptolemy was the great systematizer, but he did not collate all of the astrological information available at his time. He was pretty choosey, in deleting the parts he considered magical or unfounded. Valens was more of a compiler.
In taking your main points about Ptolemy, however, I can't see where this leads to any sort of house-sign match-up by the numbers. You won't find this in Ptolemy.
Now, I hope that with this brief introduction you came to notice the importance of the ptolemaic syncretism of the previous traditions. Syncretism is a word that means "putting together", and it's a concept really important that I've been trying to underline from the beginning. Syncretism= Ptolemy condensed different traditions.
Alright, let's move further and let's se what all the excerpts I quoted have to say about the houses, planets and signs.
1)There are no houses. There are angles. Angles are not houses, the angles are the 4 spots drawn from the 2 axis, that correspond to the 4 cardinal points, which Ptolemy calculated (sorry for calling them houses, I was trying to make things easier, obviously it didn't work).
As I mentioned above, there is a problem in some translations, where the ancient Greek probably does translate more concisely into our English word "houses," but if you follow the astrology, the ancient authors did not mean houses in our contemporary sense, they meant signs. I also discussed angles recently-- not sure if you read my posts. Did you?
2)The 4 angles, that are specific places inside the wheel, have a stronger quality to them, so that when a planet falls in them, they'll be stronger. There are even succedent places and signs, that are not strong like the angular, but it depends on other factors too.
You'll find this discussion in my recent posts. Did you read them?
3)The precession of the equinoxes, given arbitrarily we don't know by who and when, as neither did Ptolemy, was nevertheless considered fundamental to set the zodiacal wheel to start with Aries. It was Hipparcus to trace the first official date for when the Aries precession occurred, he even gave the dispositions to calculate it, and we know that Ptolemy adopted it and tried to calculate it as well, but he calculated it wrong.
What is your source, here? The point being, that with the use of 30-degree pie-slices of the heavens that only loosely correspond to the constellations for which they were named, you can put the Aries Point about anywhere in the sign. The Babylonians had some older measurements that put the equinox at 8 and 5 degrees, but they do not seem to have understood precession.
In the passages I posted here it was shown the importance he attributes to it: Aries happens to have spring-like, moist features that very much fit its nature, he even states that if the precession had to start with another sign then the whole wheel would be "alien", i.e. it wouldn't make sense.
5) In the very first excerpts I pasted, Ptolemy makes the 4 angles correspond to the seasonal cycle, explaining them with their qualities: cold, dry etc.
The seasonal cycle is as well associated to the signs.
6) Every sign is the "house" of a planet, and every angle, is more or less attuned with the qualities both of the planets and those of the signs, Ptolemy then recommends One to take into account all these corresponding factors, to obtain the most accurate reading. (first excerpt)
This didn't work the way your modern house=sign system does. Ptolemy indicates a system of planetary domiciles (moon-Cancer, Saturn-Capricorn) based upon the planets' distance from the sun and earth both temporally and spatially (geocentric orbits.) His system further relates to the Aristotelian qualities of cold/warm/wet/dry, not to a group of modern personality traits.
We have to consider the Tetrabiblos is one of the oldest treatise we have on astrology. Most of its rules and theories have been proved wrong. This is not a bible, although for us astrologers, it could be considered like it.
No, it's not a Bible. But hardly any of its rules and theories have been "proved wrong." Some have been simply ignored, refined, or replaced.
Considering this: that Aries starts our wheel, and it is associated to spring; that spring is associated to the moist, and that moist is associated to strength; that angular spots are stronger, and they are just places... to me it's like making 2+2= 4.
This logic entirely escapes me. In Aristotelian proto-science, warmth and moisture promoted plant growth, whereas cold and dry conditions were inimicable to growth. But a planet like Mars could be excessively hot. This didn't really relate to "strength." Aries is no "stronger" than any other sign unless it happens to fall on a chart angle in a particular horoscope.
The Babylonian calendar did start with Aries, as it corresponded with the lambing season. They didn't use houses, however.
I don't know if you're familiar with the idealized
thema mundi chart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thema_Mundi of ancient astrology, which gives Cancer rising, and shows the planets in their domiciles. The rationale for Cancer rising apparently was to start the chart with the signs at the warmest part of the year.
Ptolemy didn't really say houses=signs. He just said that the spots in the wheel called angular or succedent, that we call houses, have a given quality to them.
Then he says these qualities of the angles are associate to spring and winter etc., just like signs.
Ptolemy here deals with seasons, which are, well, seasonal. Houses are diurnal. Note, too, that the order of rising signs is the reverse of the order of sun-signs.
I wasn't trying to let you see Ptolemy confirming the houses= signs theory. He's "our astrological father", and he himself made the rules that brought us to create such a theory.
If you actually connect those pieces: seasons/signs/planets/angles, you'll see every part is connected to the other. That's what Ptolemy said in all the excerpts I pasted anyway.
ps, none in here wants to take away the importance of house-cusps. this has nothing to do with house cusps.
Now, I'm really mystified. Nowhere in either your excerpt or this overview have you explained that Ptolemy confirmed houses=signs. He didn't like to divide quadrants into discrete houses, for one thing, so that is a leap of logic. You can hardly pin on him a theory that had no currency until the early 20th century.