The Sibly Chart of the USA

Recently, while reading Ken Bowser’s article on the Sibly chart of the American Revolution, it occurred to me that many astrologers may not be familiar with Sibly’s reasoning. With this in mind, I decided to look up and reproduce here Sibly’s comments from his 1826 book, A new and complete illustration of the celestial science of astrology: or, The art of foretelling future events and contingencies by the aspects, positions, and influences of the heavenly bodies … In four parts by Sibly, Ebenezer (1751-1800). Here are the relevant pages:

Sibly begins his analysis with the Vernal Equinox of 1776 calculated for London. He notes that Jupiter rules the Ascendant of the Aries Ingress chart and lies in detriment in Gemini in the 7th house of open adversaries. To locate the significator of England in the chart, he looks to Mars because Aries is the presumed Ascendant of England, and Mars rules Aries. Unfortunately, in the 1776 Aries Ingress chart in London, Mars, though strong in Aries, lies in darkness beneath the horizon and is combust the Sun. The Moon (the common people of England) is also combust the Sun and afflicted by a conjunction to Mars.

Furthmore, Mars is advancing to perfect an opposition to Saturn, exalted in Libra, in the powerful 10th house. Saturn is further fortified by close trines from the two benefics, Venus and Jupiter. Sibly states that Saturn in this chart signifies America and the American congress, presumably because of the essential dignities of each planet. Because Saturn is more powerful in this chart, and Mars will soon perfect its opposition to Saturn, he foresees “a total and eternal separation of the two countries.”

To determine when this separation will take place, he does a kind of primary direction on the Aries Ingress chart. He notes the Right Ascension of Mars and Saturn and calculates the arc between them to be 16 degrees and 22 minutes of arc, which he must then convert to units of time. There must be a typo in the text because he says that Saturn and Mars occupy “common” signs — he must have meant “cardinal signs.” A rule of thumb for speed is that cardinal signs are fast, common (mutable signs) are intermediate, and fixed signs are very slow. Sibly reasons that in cardinal signs each degree of Right Ascension will be equivalent to about a week so that in about 15 weeks and 2 days from the Aries Ingress (of March 20, 1776) the Mars-Saturn opposition is likely to manifest. (There are 107 days between March 20th and July 4th (including the end date), 107 days divided by 7 days per week = 15 weeks and 2 days.)

In fact, Sibly’s reasoning doesn’t make sense to me. He argues that time should be judged from the number of days it takes the Sun to traverse the arc of Right Ascension between Mars and the oppositive of Saturn. It will takes the Sun a little more that 16 days to traverse that arc, but somehow Sibly came up with a little more than 15 days.

If we relocated Sibly’s original USA Independence chart (19 AQ 49′ rising) from London to Philadelphia, we get Uranus exactly on the western horizon opposing the Ascendant degree.

Interestingly, the 1776 Cancer Ingress chart for Philadelphia has the same cusps as the Gemini rising chart of Dr. James D. Keifer from the early 1900s.