Introduction The planets are the first effector astrological. The Aspect is therefore an essential astrological entity, since it defines both the key frequencies of a cycle (Aspects of a planet to itself during its geocentric period) or an intercycle (privileged relationship that is periodically established between two or more planets). In contemporary sky charts, the Aspects appear in a (...)

The original notion of Aspect among the Babylonians In the joint beginnings of astrology and astronomy a few millennia ago, Babylonian scholar-priests paid attention to only one Aspect: the conjunction (≈ 0°), major celestial phenomenon because the most visible. The astronomico-astrological tablets of the 18th to the 16th century BCE that have been found attest to this. This interest in (...)

From disuse to the Renaissance Two hundred years after Ptolemy, astrology had gradually fallen into disuse in the Roman-Christian West, serious European astrologers and researchers became extremely rare between the 4th and the 13th century, and have hardly left any traces. There was now more concern for the salvation of his crucified soul than for the status of the astrological Aspects. So (...)

Astrology in full swing The work of the German astronomer-astrologer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) is one key moment in the history of science, a century after the Copernican revolution: with Copernicus (1473–1543), we went from geocentrism to heliocentrism and Kepler discovered that planetary orbits were not perfect circles, but ellipses. Faced with this revolution in our conception of the (...)

Post-Kepler The planetary Aspects are now clearly identified as such by a minority of learned astrologers, and not as dependencies of the Ptolemaic zodiacal geometry, even if the latter retains some influence on their definition and on the admitted orbs. Theoretical debates about them will henceforth focus a lot about orbs and a tiny bit about ecliptic latitudes. To calculate the Aspects (...)

The end of the 19th and the very first years of the 20th century are seeing two major innovations in the conception and perception of the Aspects and their orbs. We have to conceptual revival to the English astrologers Zadkiel and Alan Leo, and the graphic renovation, therefore perceptive, to the French astrologer Paul Choisnard. They did not know each other and most likely were unaware of (...)

The long history of the conception of the Aspects and their orbs shows that in order to measure them, the vast majority of learned astrologers, who were usually also astronomers, practically always neglected the ecliptic latitudes of the planets. The absence of this coordinate in the calculation of the Aspects is a phenomenon all the more interesting and meaningful that these observers and (...)

Jean-Pierre Nicola and the first theory of Aspects It is among other things in returning to the concerns and observations of early Mesopotamian astronomers-astrologers and in pondering Kepler’s failure that in the second half of the 20th century, the astrologer Jean-Pierre Nicola (1929) refounded the conception of the Aspects, unchanged since Ptolemy or even Kepler, which constituted a (...)

Annex We observed that many 17th century astrologers considered the parallels of declination or contra-antiscia like Aspects. It is a mistake that has persisted and we will demonstrate it. And by the way, we will rehabilitate the perpendiculars of declinations or contra-antiscia, unjustly neglected by most ancient or contemporary astrologers. The video below (6′ 53″) is a commented animation (...)