← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 12/235
Degree
The measure
A chart is a circle of 360 degrees. The zodiac divides it into twelve signs of 30° each, and every degree is divided again into 60 minutes of arc (written ′), each minute into 60 seconds (″). Lilly sets it out in his first chapter: every sign contains thirty degrees, every degree sixty minutes, the beginning is from Aries, and so the whole zodiac contains 360 degrees.
So a planet's position is given as a degree and minute within a sign. It is a measure of distance along the circle, not of time and not of temperature.
Reading a position
Take 14°23′ Leo:
- Leo is the sign — the fifth, covering 120° to 150° of the circle.
- 14° means fourteen whole degrees have been completed since the start of Leo.
- 23′ adds twenty-three sixtieths of a degree — a little over a third.
Counted round the whole circle from 0° Aries, that is 120° + 14°23′ = 134°23′. Because fourteen whole degrees are complete, the position lies in the fifteenth degree of Leo — the older way of counting, which Lilly uses when he says that the second degree of Taurus is the thirty-second of the zodiac. Both ways of speaking are common; it helps to know which a writer means.
For a sense of scale: the full Moon is about half a degree across. The Moon itself moves roughly 13° a day, about half a degree an hour, and the Ascendant moves on average a degree every four minutes — which is why an accurate birth time matters so much for the angles and the houses, and much less for the slow planets.
Divisions within a sign
Degrees are the basis of the finer divisions of each sign:
- the three decans or faces, of 10° each;
- the five unequal terms or bounds;
- the 12 dwads of 2½° and other harmonic divisions used by some astrologers.
These are why the degree, and not just the sign, decides a planet's full essential dignity, and why two planets in the same sign can still be in different terms and faces.
Early, late and "critical" degrees
A planet at 0° has only just entered its sign; at 29° it is about to leave. Many astrologers read the very first and last degrees as a threshold — a planet beginning a matter, or finishing one. A position near the edge also explains an out-of-sign aspect, where two planets are close enough in degrees to aspect each other even though their signs do not.
Several traditions go further and give certain degrees a meaning of their own. Lilly printed tables of masculine and feminine degrees, light and dark degrees, "deep or pitted" degrees and "lame" (azimene) degrees, used in horary for fine distinctions. Later writers, deVore and Gearhart among them, list critical degrees — 0°, 13° and 26° of the cardinal signs, with their own sets for the fixed and mutable signs — tied to the Moon's daily travel and the old lunar mansions. Modern astrology often calls the 29th degree the anaretic degree and reads it as urgency or a matter coming to a head.
These degree meanings are a later and less agreed layer than the signs and their dignities. They are worth knowing as a tradition, but no reading should hang on them alone; the charts here do not flag them.
How degrees are shown here
The Degree column in the chart tables shows the degree and minute within the sign, as 14° 23′; a whole degree with no minutes shows as 14°. Minutes are cut down rather than rounded, so 14° 23′ means somewhere from 14°23′ up to, but not including, 14°24′. Declination is a different measure — north or south of the celestial equator — and is shown separately as a signed number of degrees.