SteveS wrote: Tue Feb 26, 2019 2:34 pm
Thanks Jim, sorry to repeat the same question again, but at times I get confused on this Q1 issue. I wish I had been able to follow this Q- Q2 issue from the beginning of the early writing from the Siderealist.
It's not
exactly a Q1 vs. Q2 issue (it's not event a quotidian, or Q). It's knowing how Solar Fire had to have been written, and using it in ways not originally planned by the programmers.
Here's a review of the Q issue and how that applies to using this trick in Solar Fire:
Secondary Progressions have long been stated as 1 day (symbolic time) = 1 year ("real" time). This definition seems perfectly clear and complete until you realize that there are different meanings of the words "day" and "year,"
i.e., different kinds of day and year.
For the present discussion, there is no question about the meaning of "year" large enough to digress and make this more complicated, so I'll skip it for the moment.
Two kinds of
day are the civil day and the sidereal day. The
sidereal day is the time it takes Earth to spin once on its axis: that is, the time it takes for the Midheaven to spin back around to the same longitude.It's 23:56:03 of clock time. (Your MC is 6°25' Leo. Set up another chart for 23:56:03 later, or September 21, 1947, 9:56:03 AM, and the MC is again 6°25' Leo.)
The
civil day is the day we know by our clocks. It is the average length of time between two consecutive culminations of Sun (two consecutive sundial noons). I say "average" because Sun moves at different speeds during the year, so during part of the year it takes less than 23:56:03 for MC to spin around and catch it on the next pass, and sometimes it takes more. On average, though, since Sun moves
about 1°/day, Midheaven has to advance an extra 1° to catch up to it. (Sun on MC today at 13° Aquarius means it will be on MC at 14° Aquarius tomorrow: the MC has move an extra degree to "close the gap" and catch up to Sun.) Therefore, the civil day is about 4 minutes of time longer than the sidereal day (on average, 3 minutes 56.56 seconds longer.
Just to avoid confusion in the
very easy next step, make sure you understand the difference between sidereal day and civil day: A sidereal day is the time it takes Earth to rotate (MC back to the same MC); a civil day is the average time it takes Earth to rotate AND for MC to catch up to Sun (about 4 minutes longer).
Now we're ready for the definitions:
On the formula of "1 day = 1 year," one theory is that one sidereal day = 1 year; another theory is that one civil day = 1 year. The first (sidereal day) is the Q1. The second (civil day) is the Q2. That's all there is to it.
Since the sidereal day is about 4 minutes shorter than the civil day, the Q1 angles
lose about 1° a year (or, to say it the other way: Q2 angles
gain about a degree a year). At age 71, we would expect (for any particular day) that the Q2 MC would be
about 71° ahead of the Q1 MC (or, more exactly, 3m57s x 71 = 70°). Since the Q2 chart is calculated at 71 for a time 4h40m
later than the Q1, and Moon moves about 1° every two hours, at this age Q2 Moon will be about 2° later in the zodiac than Q1 Moon.
So much for secondary progressions.
Now, in Solar Fire when you flip the Q2 switch to Q1,
all Solar Fire has to do is change the definition of "day" that it uses. When you pick Q1, it uses sidereal day. When you pick Q2, it uses civil day. It doesn't make a whole new formulation, it just changes one value. This is really useful to know because we might be able to apply it in other situations that the Solar Fire programmers didn't anticipate.
Which brings us to tertiaries...
Tertiary progressions are based on the formula 1 day (symbolic time) = 1 month ("real" time). "Month" is understood to be a sidereal month - the time it takes Moon to circle the Earth, or about 27.3 days. Again, we have to identify what "day" means. Historically, it has been understood to mean a
civil day. That's what was meant by Troinski when he reinvented them in modern times, by Lyndoe when he poplarized them, and by Bradley when he gave them a further push.
So, when you use Solar Fire to calculate tertiaries, you are getting
1 civil day = 1 sidereal month.
Clay - if I have understood his intention correctly - is proposing that a
sidereal day should be used instead of the civil day. His formula of
1 sidereal day = 1 sidereal month is identical except the formula uses a different length for day. I discovered that if you set the Q2/Q1 flag to Q1, Solar Fire uses the
sidereal day definition, so - even though it's not
per se about quotidians - you can trick Solar Fire into using the
1 sidereal day = 1 sidereal year formula.
It's just a trick.