In this episode of the serial I’m going to consider medieval directions. Or to be more precise, I begin to consider medieval directions.
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The posts on astrology
Often we would like to restore data from a chart or coordinates of planets and houses in ancient texts. To make this task more easy, I have made a new tool that allows to restore geographic latitude of a chart from ecliptic longitudes of Mid-Heaven and Ascendant. Hope it helps 
We upload one of the seven chapters of Cardano’s Seven Segments with commentaries for open internet access as a free pdf-file.
The book is still not finished, although we are getting close to that; probably some more months are needed – the main problem is the work load that leaves too little time to focus on the book, unfortunately.
We decided that readers should know what they can expect from the entire book.
We hope the book will be finished soon.
Anton Grigoriev & Valerie Livina
You can get the e-book via this direct link or via a new e-books section.
There is an update in Tools.
Regiomontanian Pole Calculator allows to calculate a pole of a planet according to Regiomontanus.
Warring! This new tool works in a test mode now.
Often a querent asks several questions at the same time. There are interesting rules for such cases in a book of Abenragel, the astrologer of X-XI cc. Is there any modern astrologer, who uses these rules in practice? 
I havn’t been tried them, actually. But after unexpectedly good results with the rules about querent’s thoughts I will try these as well
The fragment from Abenragel (Abû l-Hasan ‘Alî ibn Abî l-Rijâl), the court astrologer to the Tunisian prince al-Mu’izz ibn Bâdis, on how to find querent’s thoughts with horary astrology:
From time to time we find there are many things besides astrology in our life. From time to time we find that everything in our life is astrology. It’s all very well 
Sometimes you can meet a maniac and find it is a good chance to observe the effects of atra bilis or overheated melancholy
Last weekend we opened an exhibition of my wife’s paintings in the State Art Museum in the kremlin. This event had a strong scent of Venus – the aesthetic feast with paintings, chamber music and buffet tables.
This prompted me pay my attention to Venus in a period of the exhibition. And I found a pretty curious condition of Venus in this period.
Comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin), discovered in July 2007, is going to its closest approach. It will pass the opposition to the Sun at this period, and will have the greatest magnitude. The comet is predicted to be 5th magnitude, which means it could be visible to the naked eye. Though celestial bodies of 5th magnitude are visible to the naked eye, it will be not so easy task to see the comet in the sky. It will be visible only in rural locations without a light pollution.
We can try to see this comet at 24th-26th of February, at night. It will have only 5th magnitude, therefore it can be visible only after the end of astronomical twilight, i.e. when the Sun after a sunset reaches altitude of 18 degrees under the horizon. At this time we can try to find the comet somewhere between East and South-East. I think the good reference points can be Saturn and Regulus.
If you will be lucky and discover the first appearance of the commet in the sky, you can erect the chart and make a prediction. But what if we are not so lucky? Fortunately, The astrological tradition allows to say something about a comet even if we don’t know the moment of its first appearence.
There is a small update in the Tools. I’ve added a new tool. This new tool can find a point of the ecliptic from its right ascension, oblique ascension, and oblique descension.
I thank rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra for the inspiration Checking his method of cusps calculations, I felt a necessity of this tool.
Though, it is a usual thing in old-fashioned calculations in various house systems, actually. Regiomontanus has the same searching for the ecliptical point from its oblique ascension.
I think every astrologer knows that there is a Placidean house system. Some of astrologers are informed that Placidus is not the inventor of this house system. Few astrologers heard that Avraham Ibn Ezra wrote about this system five centuries before Placidus. But much less number of astrologers know what and where Ibn Ezra really wrote.
Ibn Ezra really described the house system that is based on the hour distance of the point of ecliptic from the meridian. And it is really the same basic idea as in Placidean house system.
Ibn Ezra describes this system in his ספר הטעמים א (The Book of Reasons A). A is important in this case, because there are two versions of The Book of Reasons – version A and version B. Version A is more than twice bigger than version B. But the English translation of The Book of Reasons by Meira Epstein is based on the version B. Therefore English speaking readers are bereft of some very interesting and important parts of this Ibn Ezra’s work, including the part on house system.
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