Barleywine
This is a snippet from an article in Dave Roell's weekly astroamerica.com newsletter called "Toward a Grammar of Astrology." It appears to be written by Dave, although he makes no claim of originality. This reminds me of the mental excercise that I picked up during my early astrological studies back in the 1970s: trying to figure out the correlation of the bits and pieces of a chart from a "who, what, where, why and when" perspective.
"The house-sign-planet blend is the essence of astrology. (Not aspects.) Make the houses nouns. Make the planets verbs. Signs are modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases). Use keywords to make sentences: Noun–verb–object."
For the sake of argument, I've always considered the houses to be "where" something manifests, the planets to be "what" will exert a presence there and the signs to be "how" (modifiers - adjectives, adverbs, etc. is how I've always thought of them) the planetary energies will be shaded or colored (although planetary action taken as "verbs" would also have a say in the "how"). "Why" the astrological footprint assumes its unique form is provided by the overall chart synthesis, and it could be suggested that the root of "who" the native personality is stems from the Ascendant/Sun/Moon combination. The "when" part of the "who-what-why-where-when" equation only enters into it when you put the natal chart into motion over time.
This is nothing I have any particular philosophical or intellectual stake in, just something that caught my interest in the newsletter, primarily because houses have never made me think of "nouns" since they represent the field of action for the planetary interplay. Maybe there are a few grammatical subleties Dave left out of the picture, but I'm no expert on the terminology.
"The house-sign-planet blend is the essence of astrology. (Not aspects.) Make the houses nouns. Make the planets verbs. Signs are modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases). Use keywords to make sentences: Noun–verb–object."
For the sake of argument, I've always considered the houses to be "where" something manifests, the planets to be "what" will exert a presence there and the signs to be "how" (modifiers - adjectives, adverbs, etc. is how I've always thought of them) the planetary energies will be shaded or colored (although planetary action taken as "verbs" would also have a say in the "how"). "Why" the astrological footprint assumes its unique form is provided by the overall chart synthesis, and it could be suggested that the root of "who" the native personality is stems from the Ascendant/Sun/Moon combination. The "when" part of the "who-what-why-where-when" equation only enters into it when you put the natal chart into motion over time.
This is nothing I have any particular philosophical or intellectual stake in, just something that caught my interest in the newsletter, primarily because houses have never made me think of "nouns" since they represent the field of action for the planetary interplay. Maybe there are a few grammatical subleties Dave left out of the picture, but I'm no expert on the terminology.