sciences by unprincipled charlatans who use their little knowledge for personal gain. His
contributions under this heading are as vital today as when he wrote them.
In the second classification he shows that while astrology must have advanced a long way,
interpretation had suffered from a lack of knowledge of the mechanics through which it
operates, and this knowledge he attempted to supply.
It is in this third classification that instead of clarifying issues, he succeeded mainly in
introducing a maze of superfluities, complexities and contradictions.
Of all the theories which he advanced none has been restated more often in contradictory
terms than his Doctrine of Orientality. Even Placidus remarked that "everyone knows how
largely and to what little purpose authors have treated of the orientality of the planets." To
this James Wilson, in his most personal of dictionaries since the days of the ubiquitous
Samuel Johnson, adds that "this may well be the case, when the whole was unintelligible even
to these authors themselves." Ironically he says: "Orientality I do not comprehend any better
than Ptolemy himself, and therefore can say little on the subject." When Ptolemy speaks of
the nearness of Mercury's sphere to that of the Moon, Wilson's comment is to the effect that it
doesn't make sense. No wonder.
To make sense out of Ptolemy's doctrines one must first reconstruct the firmament as he saw
it. Around the Earth were ten spheres; one each for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun,
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, in which the planets "struggle against the primum mobile"; in an
eighth sphere, two small circles wherein the beginning of Aries and Libra "trembles and
vibrates" - referring no doubt to the then unexplainable phenomenon of precession; in a ninth
sphere, "a crystalline or watery heaven in which no star has been discovered"; and around
them all, like a steel tire on a wagon wheel, a tenth sphere, the primum mobile, which by its
superior force carries all within it in a diurnal rotation from the east through the meridian to
the west.
Forgetting that which we have since learned, one must realize that all Ptolemy knew about the
proper or orbital motions of the bodies was that they struggled ineffectually against the
compelling force of the "ambient" - which incidentally is a good word. Every concept in his
system is based upon apparent motion - and he did not know that it was merely apparent.
Since the Sun's motion is faster than that of any of the major planets, they did indeed separate
from the Sun in a clockwise direction, rising and eventually culminating at the midheaven.
The minor planets, of course, never got far enough away from the Sun to culminate, so they
were differentiated by whether they rose in the morning before the Sun, or set in the evening
after the Sun.