The Lots of Fortune and Spirit

How a lot is measured

For a daytime birth, with the Sun above the horizon, the Lot of Fortune is as far from the ascendant as the Moon is from the Sun, counted the same way round the zodiac. For a night birth the two lights swap places in the formula. The Lot of Spirit uses the same three points the other way round, so the two lots always sit symmetrically either side of the ascendant.

Day and night

The swap for night births is the older practice, written down by Hellenistic astrologers in the first centuries of the common era, who treated day and night charts as different in kind. Many modern astrologers use the daytime formula for every chart. The page follows the older rule and gives the daytime version alongside when your chart is a night chart, so either can be read.

What a lot is read as

Fortune is traditionally read in connection with the body and circumstances, what happens to someone; Spirit with the mind and what they set out to do. The house a lot falls in is read as the part of life that theme plays out in. That is the tradition’s vocabulary, described here, and nothing on this page predicts anything.

How the page works it out

It uses the birth chart saved on this device, and it needs a birth time, because a lot is counted from the ascendant and the ascendant moves on a sign every two hours or so. The page decides whether the chart is a day or a night chart from whether the Sun sits in the half above the horizon, the seventh to twelfth houses. It then measures the distance from one light to the other in zodiac order, adds that distance to the ascendant, and marks where the count ends. Each lot’s house is given by Placidus, with the whole-sign house alongside when the two differ.

An example

Take a day chart with the ascendant at 10° Aries, the Sun at 20° Capricorn and the Moon at 5° Gemini. Counting forward from the Sun to the Moon is 135°. The same 135° counted on from 10° Aries ends at 25° Leo, so the Lot of Fortune is at 25° Leo, the fifth sign from the rising sign. Spirit is counted from the Moon to the Sun, 225°, and lands at 25° Scorpio, the eighth sign. The two sit 135° either side of the ascendant, which is the symmetry the drawing shows.

Fortune, Spirit and the Arabic parts

Hellenistic astrologers used many lots, and Fortune and Spirit were the two principal ones, Fortune tied to the Moon and Spirit to the Sun. Vettius Valens, writing in the second century, worked with both. Ptolemy, in the same century, used the Lot of Fortune but counted it from the Sun to the Moon for every chart, day or night. Astrologers writing in Arabic in the Middle Ages took the lots on and added many more, which is why they are also called the Arabic parts, and why the Lot of Fortune is so often called the Part of Fortune.

Common confusions

The biggest is the day and night formula: two calculators can put the lot in different places for the same chart simply because one reverses the formula at night and the other does not. The next is a birth with the Sun close to the horizon, where a few minutes of birth time decide which formula applies. And without a birth time there is no ascendant, so no lot can be placed at all.

Lots depend on the ascendant, so the rising sign page is the place to see why the birth minute matters. What the house of a lot is read as is set out under the houses, and your birth chart shows the Sun, Moon and ascendant the lots are built from.