Paul Christian’s onomantic horoscope
In 1870 Paul Christian described a horoscope that does not look at the sky: it starts from your names and your date of birth, and draws arcana and planets by calculation. We have reconstructed his method step by step.
What this page does, and what it does not
It runs the calculation of book VI of the Histoire de la magie: the alphabet of the Magi, the calendar, the thirty-six-year cycles, the seven fatidic circles of seventy-eight arcana. We checked the reconstruction on the example Christian gives himself, the horoscope of Louis XVI: it returns the same sums (200, 137, 30, 13, 41), the same culminating year (1786) and the same signs, house by house.
It gives no presages. For those Christian refers to the “general keys” of his book VII, several hundred aphorisms that we have not transcribed. The figure is what the method produces; reading it is still to be done.
Three points where we had to decide
- The book’s table of cycles stops in 2016. We continue the same rule: a cycle of Saturn opens in 2017.
- The letter W does not exist in the alphabet of the Magi. We count it as V.
- Christian inserts five “epagomenal” days into Cancer (20, 22, 24, 26 and 28 June) without saying which degree they take. We take the degree before.
A name that is not Latinised gives another result: the method requires it, and Christian himself says one should “operate only conditionally”.