the-astrology-book

Local Mean Time
drawing on virtually the entire European corpus then available—more than 200 titles
are cited—the book is stamped with Lilly’s own unmistakable style, the sample judgments
combining the skill of an artist with an authority at once pragmatic and spiritual.
Many are horary, reflecting both its importance in a period when many people had
no idea of their birth time, but also Lilly’s kind of divinatory astrology. It embraced,
without any sense of necessary contradiction, a disciplined and systematic approach to
knowledge that has since become identified as “scientific”; the magical sense of not
only discerning but negotiating with destiny, and thus potentially changing it; and the
possibility of religiously inspired, and piously revered prophecy. Within Lilly’s lifetime,
these three strands started to become seriously estranged. Even within the astrological
tradition, there were subsequently only either scientific or magical (and sometimes spiritual)
astrologers, and these two camps were in perpetual opposition.
Lilly was a genius at something— judicial astrology—that modern mainstream
opinion has since decided is impossible to do at all, let alone do well or badly. Only in
the final decades of the twentieth century, with a renewal of interest and respect
among both astrologers and historians, did he begin to receive proper recognition.
Sources:
Cornelius, Geoffrey. The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination. London: Penguin/Arkana,
1994.
Curry, Patrick. Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989.
Geneva, Ann. Astrology and the Seventeenth Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the
Stars. Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Lilly, William. Christian Astrology. London: Regulus, 1647.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973.
—Patrick Curry
LION
The Lion is a popular name for the sign Leo.
LOCAL MEAN TIME
Before the advent of rapid travel and modern means of long distance communication,
particular localities kept time according to the noontime position of the Sun. Because
this varied east or west of any given location, the local time also varied as one traveled
east or west. The imposition of standard time zones, in which one must set her or his
watch forward or backward as an imaginary line is crossed, is a comparatively recent
innovation. Time zones serve many purposes, but, to properly cast a horoscope,
astrologers must find the true local time during which a native was born. In other
words, they must convert a birth time expressed in standard time back into local “Sun
time.” The more common designation for Sun time is local mean time.
Traditionally, astrologers made this conversion by making certain calculations
based on the longitude where a native was born. In more recent years, tables of time
THE ASTROLOGY BOOK
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