Free Hyleg Calculator

The hyleg, also called the apheta or giver of life, is the point a traditional chart treats as its main marker of vitality. It is chosen from five candidates: the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant, the Lot of Fortune, and the prenatal lunation (the New or Full Moon before birth). Sect, house placement, and essential dignity decide which one wins.

Each candidate is a recognized significator of the body and the life force in the older material. Ptolemy, Dorotheus, Valens, and later Perso-Arabic authors preserve length-of-life doctrines that turn on this point, though the exact selection rules differ from author to author. Rather than pick one contested reconstruction and present it as settled, this calculator applies a visible modern rule set and shows every step, so you can see why a candidate qualified or fell out.

Hyleg is the Persian and Arabic name that medieval astrology carried for the Greek apheta, the releaser. On this page the label is historical shorthand for that vitality function. It does not mean the calculator measures life expectancy, medical health, or a date of death.

Modern astrologers rarely compute a hyleg. It belonged to length-of-life work, which fell out of practice in the twentieth century and has only partly returned through the Hellenistic revival. Read as symbolic testimony rather than prognosis, though, the hyleg still earns its place. It names the chart's vitality anchor, which you weigh against the Ascendant, the sect light, the chart ruler, and the wider dignity picture.

To find the hyleg, this calculator ranks the five candidate points with two filters applied in sect order. First it checks whether each point sits in a hylegiacal house. Then it scores the survivors on essential dignity at their own degree and selects the strongest, with the sect light given first refusal. The steps below walk through the whole contest.

Classical astrologers used the hyleg in length-of-life calculations with a technique that combined the alcocoden's planetary years and primary directions to anaretic (destroying) degrees. Bonatti's version is the most-cited; Lilly transmitted it into English in the seventeenth century.

Modern traditional astrologers debate these techniques heavily. The Seven Stars overview documents the diversity of rules, the later medieval dependence on planetary years, and the risk of retrofitting missed predictions. The technique remains valuable as classical history and as symbolic vitality testimony. It does not give you a death date.

If you wanted a prediction tool, this is not one. If you wanted a transparent traditional vitality marker to compare with the rest of the chart, that is the intended use.

The hyleg and the alcocoden are two halves of one traditional procedure, and they are easy to confuse. The hyleg is the giver of life, the vitality point itself. The alcocoden is the giver of years, the planet that rules the hyleg's degree and lends its own planetary-year bands to the length-of-life estimate.

In practice you find the hyleg first, then read off its degree to find the alcocoden. If your hyleg lands at 12° Cancer, the alcocoden is whichever planet holds that degree by bound or by overall dignity, and its condition (angular or cadent, dignified or peregrine, aspecting the hyleg or not) decides whether you take its lesser, middle, or greater years.

The alcocoden calculator picks up exactly where this one leaves off, and the almuten figuris calculator adds the third and broadest member of the same family, the planet that wins the whole chart on dignity points.

Classical authorities: Ptolemy Tetrabiblos III.10 (hylegiacal places), Dorotheus of Sidon Carmen Astrologicum III, Vettius Valens Anthology III, Perso-Arabic length-of-life authors, Guido Bonatti Liber Astronomiae III, and William Lilly Christian Astrology.

Modern reception: Bernadette Brady The Hyleg and Alcoccoden, Robert Schmidt Definitions and Foundations, Skyscript's hyleg glossary, and Seven Stars Astrology's overview of traditional length-of-life techniques.

Computational defaults: computed from the same natal chart service used by the rest of the public tools. Whole Sign houses by default. Lot of Fortune sect-corrected. Dignity scoring uses Egyptian Bounds and Dorothean triplicities. Tiebreaking applies sect priority first, then self-dignity, then angularity. For the dignity layer alone, see the essential dignities calculator.