What Sepharial particularly overlooked was the fact that Ptolemy knew nothing about proper
motion, and that before the Sun did not mean before it in orbital motion in the order of the
signs, but before it in rising as it comes above the horizon and mounts to the Midheaven. All
that Ptolemy meant by oriental he said again when he described a planet as matutine. Wilson
tried to remedy this by suggesting that it was matutine for three signs and oriental for the next
three signs, but obviously it cannot be farther removed from the Sun than 90º, or it would rise
before the Sun, not in the morning but before midnight of the night before; or it would not set
until after midnight, which would be the next day after today's sunset. Naturally this problem
does not arise in connection with Mercury and Venus, which never get that far away from the
Sun.
Evidently oriental was intended to apply to the major planets and the Moon; while matutine
and vespertine, which meant the same thing, were intended to apply to the inferior planets;
but Ptolemy lost himself in his own words, and by using both terms in abandoned redundancy
managed to leave posterity in a hopeless muddle in its efforts to find some difficult
explanation for a very simple thing. Both Wm. Lilly and Alan Leo list all of the houses from
the IC to the MC as oriental, yet Leo goes on to add that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Tenth,
Eleventh and Twelfth are the oriental Houses - which calls forth from Wilson the scornful
observation that a planet can thus be oriental and occidental at one and the same time.
The fact is that none of these terms are of value today, simply because we have better ways of
stating the same thing. Truth born of experience, despite anyone's efforts to explain it, and
aided by Copernicus, has led us to an inescapable correlation between the Geocentric and the
Solar Houses, until today we recognize that a planet in the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth
Geocentric Houses enjoys the same added strength by elevation that Ptolemy tried to describe
in his use of the terms Matutine, and oriental im Mundo; also that in the Tenth, Eleventh and
Twelfth Solar Houses they enjoy the strength that he expressed by his terms "oriental of the
Sun." Venus matutine is now Venus in the Eleventh or Twelfth Solar House; Vespertine, in
the First or Second Solar House. Sun or planets oriental of the horizon, or im Mundo, are now
expressed as in either the Tenth, Eleventh or Twelfth Geocentric House, as the case may be.
A planet "oriental of the Sun" is better located by its Solar House position, either the Tenth,
Eleventh or Twelfth.
Another peculiar symptom of the power Ptolemy attached to visi- bility is seen in his
classifications of Beholding Signs or signs of Equal Power, and those of Commanding and
Obeying. The Beholding Signs, those of equal power, were those whose cusps were
equidistant from the Meridian. Both are either visible or invisible, hence equally strong or
equally weak. On the other hand, the Commanding and Obeying Signs were equidistant from
the Equator, hence one was in the light and the other in darkness, because of which the one
above the horizon was Commanding and the other Obeying. Furthermore it has often been
overlooked that this distinction applied only when the respective Signs were occupied by