Prognostic for the Year 1488

The future year will take its beginning on the eleventh day of March, at the second hour, thirty-fourth minute, in unequal days, at Nuremberg. In equal hours, however, at the second hour and forty-second minute. At which time the sun is about to return to the point of the vernal tropic, with the twenty-third degree of Leo ascending. The preceding lunar opposition occurred on the ninth day of March at the third hour and thirty-first minute, with the first degree of Virgo ascending. Indeed, because the ascending sign of the year is called fixed by astrologers, we wish to be content with a single revolution.

I say that I follow the opinion of the divine Hermes, approved by all astrologers, that Mercury is to be held as the lord of this year, and not without reason. For in the figure of the sun’s entry into Aries, he alone runs in an angle, while the other planets occupy either cadent or succedent houses; therefore, he does not undeservedly seek the lordship of the year for himself. Furthermore, since he is the lord of the ascendant of the prevention a technical astrological term referring to the lunation preceding a solar ingress and does not depart from an angle in that same figure, he will undoubtedly hold the rule of the year alone. These things having been premised, let us proceed to our proposal with praise to God, yet without in any way detracting from the judgment of Divine Majesty or the free will of man. Therefore, having inspected the disposers of the times and the significations of the ascending sign of the preventional figure, as well as the significators of the eclipses, we say that this present year ought to be one of vehement dryness, with much wind and not a few mists.

The opinion of Ptolemy in the second book of the Almagest The Great Mathematical Treatise of Ptolemy warns us that the significations of the eclipses of the luminaries are not to be neglected. One luminary will be eclipsed on account of the interposition of the earth between the sun and us on the seventh day of February at the fifteenth hour and forty-ninth minute.