Daily Inspiration Quote by William Lilly

Nothing reveals the everyday reach of early modern astrology like a straight-faced instruction manual for cursed cows. William Lilly isn’t writing poetry here; he’s doing customer service for a world where misfortune needed a readable map. The line is almost comically procedural: if the client thinks the cattle are bewitched, adjust the chart. If the cattle are “great” (valuable stock), adjust it even more. The occult becomes paperwork.

The specific intent is practical: Lilly is telling working astrologers how to cast a horary chart for livestock, even down to a hierarchy of animals. In the logic of his craft, houses in the chart correspond to domains of life; by “make the twelfth house their ascendant,” he’s instructing you to reassign the chart’s starting point so the animal, not the owner, becomes the subject. That’s technical advice disguised as folk remedy. It reassures the client that the system can accommodate their problem without breaking.

The subtext is where the power sits. “Vary your Rules with Judgment” quietly admits astrology isn’t a machine that spits out truth; it’s an interpretive performance that requires credibility management. Lilly grants the practitioner discretion to bend the method while still sounding authoritative. Even “bewitched” functions less as a supernatural claim than as a culturally acceptable diagnosis for economic anxiety: illness, theft, or bad luck reframed as malign influence.

Contextually, this comes from a 17th-century England where Lilly was a public figure and astrology was both semi-respectable and widely consumed. The quote captures that friction: mystical language, bureaucratic tone, and a pragmatic promise that no problem-not even hexed cattle-is outside the consultant’s scope.