In the early 1970's I attended a workshop at the New York Astrology Center given by the late Hindu astrologer, B.V. Raman. He began presenting his charts and immediately we got first our first surprise. The charts were of course sidereal; that was no surprise. The surprise was the house system! His chart consisted of twelve squares or rectangles arranged in a larger square or rectangle (the South Indian form). [The form is posted at the end of this column.] In this South Indian form the houses are given as signs (rashis) which are always arranged as above, The sign rising is then marked either with a line in one of the corners or a diagonal line going from the lower left to the upper right of the square or rectangle representing the rising sign. The midheaven is not given. Also note that the signs are listed clockwise rather than the more familiar counterclockwise. However, the form was not so much the surprise as the fact that the houses each consisted of an entire sign and only one sign, and in fact the houses coincided with the signs, except that as houses they are counted from the rising sign. We dubbed this the “Whole-Sign House System.” I remember turning to a friend and saying “I wonder if this is what Ptolemy was actually doing.” By that time I had enough familiarity with Ptolemy to realize that he did not seem to be using either Placidus, as Placidus thought, or Equal Houses as most others thought.