William Lilly
William Lilly published Christian Astrology in London in 1647, in English rather than Latin, at the height of the English civil wars. It is the most influential astrological handbook written in English, and it has an entry here for a reason that has nothing to do with influence in the ordinary sense.
A great deal of what modern astrology software calls Ptolemy is Lilly.
The tables everyone uses, under a name that is not his
Three of this site’s own domain tables carry a Lilly column, and in each case the column exists because his version and the ancient version differ.
The triplicity rulers of the water signs are the clearest. Lilly gives Mars by day and by night, with no participating ruler 1 bk. I. That is the table nearly all modern software ships, and it ships it under the label “Ptolemaic triplicities”.
The bounds are the sharpest single case. Lilly’s Gemini row reverses the last two bounds against every Greek critical edition and every English translation, and gives different widths for the Jupiter and Mars bounds as well; his version descends from two sixteenth-century editions he owned 1 bk. I. Nearly all modern astrology software ships that row while labelling it “Ptolemaic”. It is the cleanest documented split in the whole transmission, and it is why this site publishes the witnesses side by side. See Essential Dignity.
Correction
Commonly saidThe Ptolemaic dignity tables in astrology software come from Ptolemy.
In several rows they come from Lilly, printed in 1647, working from sixteenth-century editions rather than from the Greek. The label on the table has been stable for centuries while the contents of the table have not, which is the most ordinary way a transmission goes wrong: nobody lied, and a name stayed attached to a thing it had stopped describing.
Lilly is a datable, named, printed witness with a known library, which makes his disagreements traceable in a way that most of this material is not. A row that differs between Lilly and the Greek editions is a fact about the history of the text, and this site can show both because the split is documented.
The scoring is his, and it is not ancient
This is the part with the most consequence for anyone using a modern chart tool.
Lilly assigns point values to the five essential dignities and to detriment, fall and peregrination, and sums them into a total 1 bk. I. Hellenistic authors do not do this. The ancient material rates a planet’s position by naming which dignities it holds; it does not arrive at a number.
Established
A numerical dignity score is a seventeenth-century English contribution. Wherever a dignity score appears on this site it carries the date 1647 and Lilly’s name, and the chart tool displays the dignities a planet holds without a total, because presenting a score implies a quantitative doctrine the ancient sources do not have.
Why the name vanished and the tables did not
Gap in the evidence
How Lilly’s versions came to be labelled “Ptolemaic” in twentieth-century software, and by which intermediate books, is not established by anything cited here. The plausible route runs through the nineteenth and early twentieth-century English handbooks that drew on him, and this entry does not supply a chain it has not followed.
What can be said is the shape of it. Lilly wrote in English at a moment when astrology in England was both popular and politically useful, and Christian Astrology became the reference that later English writers worked from 2. A table copied from the most available English book and attributed to the most authoritative ancient name is what happens when a discipline’s practitioners are working from the handbook in front of them rather than from the manuscript tradition behind it.
The site’s response is the same one it applies everywhere: name the witness, date him, print the disagreement, and refuse to resolve it. Lilly is the reason several of these tables have more than one column.
References
- William Lilly. Christian Astrology. London, 1647 (composed 1647). bk. I. https://archive.org/details/b30338724 recordprimary source
Second edition 1659. Where a figure differs between the two printings this site says which printing it is quoting.
- Claudius Ptolemy, trans. F. E. Robbins. Tetrabiblos. Loeb Classical Library 435. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940 (composed c. 150 CE). bk. I. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
The standard English reference and the chapter-numbering scheme this site adopts and names. Non-Robbins reprints number the chapters differently, so every locus here is given as Robbins numbering.
- Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume II: The Medieval and Modern Worlds: Continuum, 2009. ISBN 9781441181299 recordscholarly
The companion volume, and the one that carries everything after the fifth century: its own description runs from the collapse of classical astrology to popular astrology in the twentieth century and its standing in the twenty-first. Volume I stops in the ancient and classical world, so a claim about the Renaissance, the Victorian press, the newspaper column or twentieth-century psychological astrology belongs here and not there. Listed by Bloomsbury Academic since Bloomsbury acquired Continuum in 2011; the 2009 printing is Continuum, and the ISBN is unchanged.