#alcabitius

The Heterodox Sun of Aleister Crowley

The chart of Aleister Crowley is always an interesting one to analyse. His Ascendant is positioned at 7 degrees of Leo, associated in the Tarot decans established by the Golden Dawn with the Five of Wands, Saturn in detriment in Leo, a conflict between the principle of winter and devitalisation and the sign of Leo, the most egoic, life-affirming and solar of the zodiac.

This already tells us much about Crowley’s life, a polemicist and solar magician who enjoyed confrontation, opening cracks where there seemed to be solidity, and who took pleasure in those very battles symbolised by the number five, numerologically the figure that disrupts energies in search of establishing new balances after crushing the status quo. When this is positioned in the fixed Fire of Leo we have someone with an appetite for conflict and assertion.

By Alcabitius, the Sun is in the 4th house in Libra, placed directly upon the Imum Coeli. This makes it the most angular planet in the whole chart, with tremendous impact on his life. Even though it stands in the sign of its fall, where that solar ego becomes necessarily more relational, and even though it occupies the most subterranean house of the zodiac, therefore out of sect and contrary to the nature of the Sun, which prefers exposure in the upper half of the chart, it still remained an imposing Sun. The 4th house is also the house of things buried and Crowley spent much of his life searching for hidden traditions, in the etymological sense of the word occult, from the Latin occultus, the participle of occultare, meaning “to hide, to conceal, to withdraw from sight”, indicating that which remains veiled or concealed, awaiting revelation.

More at The Mirror of Sienna.

I use whole sign houses because it gives me less headaches, and because I still consider myself a beginner and it's easier, because I havent had much practice with reading for other people, I just study a lot. But I like Alcabitius as well. I watched Luis Ribeiro's classes on the reasoning and the methods of calculation for the quadrant houses and Alcabitius is simply the one which I like the best. Quadrant houses are more realistic in the way they represent the visible sky and this has always been a very important thing to consider. The signification given to everything in astrology has always been derived from how things actually look like. I always recomend learning astrology while looking at the sky. Stellarium is a good app to have as an astrologer. But Whole signs is still something you have to keep in mind even when you read using other systems. I use rulership of houses only by whole signs for example, and then the MC and IC are things of their own and they also indicate the angularity and strength of the planets. If I use Alcabitius and I see that someone has a planet on the 3rd sign from the asc but it's in the 2nd house, I would read it differently. I'd say that somehow in some small way that planet has some part in that person's finances as well, but especially I'd say that planet isn't really cadent or weak just because it's in the 3rd sign.