Editorial method

Revised 2026-03-05

This page states the rules the entries are written under. It exists because a reference work that does not describe its own method is asking to be trusted for no stated reason.

Rules

Describe, do not endorse

An entry records what practitioners hold and what terms mean. It does not assert that a technique works, and it does not assert that it fails. Both would be outside the scope of a glossary.

Name the disagreement

Where traditions differ, the entry says which tradition holds what. The two decan rulership schemes and the several house systems are the clearest cases, and both are frequently reported elsewhere as though there were one answer.

Numbers get checked against an ephemeris

Not against another reference work. Copied numbers propagate errors; the retrograde durations in particular are wrong in a good deal of published material.

Scope in the first sentence

Every entry opens by saying what it covers. If the first sentence cannot be written, the entry is usually two entries.

No forecasts

The Hub publishes no horoscopes, daily or otherwise, and will not. A reference that also predicts is answerable for the predictions.

Revision policy

Each entry carries the date of its last substantive revision, in ISO form, at the top. Typographical fixes do not move the date. A revision that changes what an entry claims does move it, and where the change is material the previous wording is noted in the entry itself rather than removed silently.

Sourcing

Primary sources where they exist and are translated; the standard modern handbooks otherwise. The project deliberately does not cite websites, including its own earlier versions, because the failure mode of this subject online is a chain of pages all repeating one uncited assertion from the 1970s.

Known gaps

There is no entry yet for horary, electional or mundane practice, all three of which are large enough to need proper treatment rather than a paragraph. Fixed stars, Arabic parts and the Hellenistic lots are also missing. These are listed here rather than quietly omitted so that a reader can tell the difference between a subject we have covered badly and one we have not covered at all.