I’ve been fascinated with traditional astrology and old astrology resources lately, and this was the first book I bought with really old texts. Carmen Astrologicum consists of five books (Pentateuch) and is written by a man named Dorotheus of Sidon who lived in Alexandria in the first century AD. To be exact, I have the translated version of these texts by David Pingree from a 4th Century AD Pahlavi (Persian) source.

The first book is about ‘judgement of nativities’ or natal charts. The second book about Marriage and children. Book three is on the length of life. Book four is on the transfer of years (forecasting) and lastly the fifth book is on interrogations (electional astrology).

The difference with modern western astrology, especially the kind of traditional texts of Dorotheus, is that there’s more derived from a planets’ position in signs (Triplicity) and more Arabian lots are used. Modern astrology at most uses the Lot of Fortune, which is a lot of times left to the imagination of the astrologer to interpret. Dorotheus uses at least a dozen. Of course, no planets after Saturn are used (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) since they had not been discovered yet.

If you want to find astrology’s roots this book is invaluable to any serious astrologer’s collection. The writing style is simply to be loved because eventhough it’s translated, you can really feel it’s ‘aged’. However, I’m convinced that a lot of these traditional principles could be applied to modern times with ease, be it adjusted in wording. It’s not an easy read and it hardly is suitable for ‘lookups’. For someone that has practised only modern astrology, it definitely requires some study! I however, am committed to make sense of Dorotheus text, perhaps with a little help of random visitors that come across my posts.