← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 11/235
Bounds
Listen to this article
What it is
Inside every sign the tradition marks out five smaller stretches of zodiac, of unequal length, and gives each to one of the five planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These are the bounds — Greek horia, Latin termini, and so in English also the terms. The Sun and Moon have no bounds.
Each sign therefore has a ruler as a whole (its domicile lord), and each degree within it also has a lord of the bounds. A planet at 8° Aries, for instance, stands in a sign ruled by Mars but in a bound ruled by Venus, and the tradition reads Venus as lending something of her character to it.
The Egyptian bounds
There were several tables, and they disagree. The oldest and most widely used is the set known as the Egyptian bounds, used by Dorotheus, Valens and most Hellenistic astrologers. In Aries they run:
They look arbitrary, and Ptolemy complained that they followed no consistent principle. But they hide a pattern: add up each planet's degrees across all twelve signs and the totals are Saturn 57, Jupiter 79, Mars 66, Venus 82 and Mercury 76 — together 360, and exactly the "greater years" the tradition assigns to those planets. Some broad rules hold too: the benefics Jupiter and Venus usually come early in a sign and the malefics Mars and Saturn late, and a sign's own domicile or triplicity lords tend to be placed first.
Other tables
- Ptolemaic terms. Ptolemy proposed a revised table built on his own rules, which he said he had found in an old manuscript. Medieval and Renaissance astrologers often used it: Lilly's table of essential dignities gives "the degrees for his Terms, allotted him by Ptolomy".
- Chaldean bounds. Ptolemy also records a Chaldean scheme built on a simpler numerical pattern, little used since.
Modern traditional astrologers divide between the Egyptian and the Ptolemaic tables. The difference matters for a planet within a degree or two of a boundary, so it is worth knowing which a chart is using.
How it is read
- As a dignity. A planet in its own bounds has a modest essential dignity: in Lilly's scale it scores 2, above the face (1) and below domicile, exaltation and triplicity. It is enough to keep a planet from being peregrine, and is read as a planet with a little standing of its own — a person with some resources, if not a house.
- As a description. The lord of the bounds is read as colouring the planet that stands there, in temperament rather than circumstance. deVore summarises it: the term a significator occupies "denotes that the person it signifies is of a disposition indicated by the Lord of the Term". A Mercury in a bound of Saturn may be read as more careful and serious than one in a bound of Venus.
- In timing. Hellenistic astrologers, Valens among them, moved a point such as the Ascendant through the bounds by primary direction, and took each bound's lord in turn as the "distributor" — a time lord colouring a period of the life. The bounds lords were also weighed in the old reckonings of length of life, which belong to the history of the art rather than to any reading here.
In the tradition
The bounds are among the oldest layers of Western astrology, already standard in the first centuries CE and probably older. They fell out of use in the modern era — deVore records that most of his contemporaries thought them fanciful — and returned with the revival of Hellenistic and horary practice in the late twentieth century.
In a reading here
The essential dignity score in the structured chart report follows Lilly's points, counting a planet in its own bounds as +2, and takes the bounds from the Egyptian table.