Terms and Bounds in Astrology: The Egyptian Bounds and Peregrine Planets

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Inside every sign, traditional astrology marks out five unequal stretches of degrees and hands each one to a planet. These stretches are called terms or bounds, two English names for the Greek horia, "boundaries". A planet standing in a stretch that it rules is in its own bound, which is one of the five essential dignities. Whatever planet stands there, the planet that rules the stretch is its bound lord.

Bounds are the finest of the dignities, measured in degrees rather than whole signs, and they are the last piece needed for an older test: whether a planet is peregrine, holding none of the five dignities where it stands. This page gives the standard Egyptian table, shows how to read a degree against it, and then works through the peregrine check on three example charts. The element-based dignity it relies on is explained on triplicity rulers.

About the calculator. Bounds and the peregrine check are traditional techniques that Astrologist.com explains for education; they are not features of the site. The free birth chart prints every planet's sign, degree and minutes, so you can read the bound off the table yourself, but it does not label bounds, triplicity, sect or peregrine status. The Astrologist chat is not a dignity calculator. The bounds table is an educational reference: the calculator scores nothing, and the four-condition lookup on planetary dignities explained is unchanged. The figures on this page were worked out offline with the same calculation routines as the free chart.

What bounds are

Each sign is divided into five pieces, between 2° and 12° long. The five pieces go to the five planets other than the Sun and Moon: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. Each of them rules exactly one bound in every sign. The Sun and the Moon rule no bounds anywhere, so they can never be in their own bound. The order and the widths change from sign to sign with no single arithmetic rule, but one pattern holds throughout the Egyptian table: the last bound of every sign belongs to Mars or Saturn.

The name "Egyptian" comes from Ptolemy, who reported this table in the Tetrabiblos in the second century as the version most generally accepted, attributing it to Egyptian writers, and then criticised its lack of a consistent rule. The same table appears, with only occasional small differences in individual copies, in Dorotheus of Sidon, Vettius Valens and later authors, and it is the table found in surviving horoscopes from antiquity. Despite the name, a 2011 study by the historians Alexander Jones and John Steele identified a variant of the scheme on two Babylonian cuneiform tablets in the British Museum and argued that it originated in Babylonia.

Other term systems existed. Ptolemy described a "Chaldean" system and set out his own, and Ptolemy's own terms are the ones William Lilly printed in the seventeenth century. This page names them only so that a different result from another book is not a surprise; it tabulates and uses the Egyptian bounds alone.

The Egyptian bounds

You can check the table yourself: add up each planet's bounds around the zodiac and you get Saturn 57°, Jupiter 79°, Mars 66°, Venus 82° and Mercury 76°, which make 360°. Those totals were known in antiquity and were themselves used as "years" of the planets in other techniques that this page does not cover.

Reading a degree against the table

Each range includes its starting degree and stops just before its end. Jupiter's 0°–6° of Aries runs from 0°00′ through 5°59′59″; a planet at exactly 6°00′ Aries is in Venus's bound, not Jupiter's. The same applies at every edge in the table, so no position falls in two bounds and none falls in a gap.

Ancient texts often count degrees from the "first degree" of a sign to the "thirtieth" instead of from 0° to 30°. The first to the sixth degree in that counting is the same stretch as 0°00′ up to 6°00′ here; it is a different way of writing the numbers, not a different boundary.

Display precision. The free chart prints whole minutes, cut from a position the calculator rounds to a hundredth of a degree, so a printed position can differ from the calculator's own value by up to about a minute. If a planet is shown within about 1′ of a bound edge, or exactly on an edge degree such as 6°00′, treat its bound as boundary-sensitive: the printed minutes alone cannot decide which side it falls on. The same safeguard applies to the ten-degree edges of the faces used in the peregrine check below.

How to look a planet up:

1. Read the planet's sign, degree and minutes from your free birth chart.
2. Find the sign's row in the table.
3. Move along the row to the range that contains the degree, using the rule above at the edges.
4. The planet named for that range is the bound lord. If it is the planet you are looking up, that planet is in its own bound.

For example, Ruben's Mercury, at 4°25′ Capricorn, falls in Capricorn's first range, 0°–7°, which belongs to Mercury: Ruben's Mercury is in its own bound, more than two degrees from either edge. His Sun at 15°10′ Capricorn falls in the 14°–22° range, Venus's bound, and as a light it could never be in a bound of its own.

The peregrine check

A planet is peregrine, from the Latin for a foreigner or traveller, when it has no essential dignity at all where it stands. On this page the check covers the seven traditional bodies, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and asks five questions about each:

If the answer to all five is no, the planet is peregrine under the page's working convention. A few rules keep the check consistent:

• Only the active triplicity ruler counts. In a day chart that is the element's day ruler and in a night chart its night ruler, under the Dorothean table used on the triplicity page. A planet that is only the second ruler, or only the participating ruler, does not escape peregrine status through triplicity in this check, so the result can depend on whether the chart is a day or a night chart.
• Detriment and fall do not cancel a dignity. A planet in its fall that is also its element's active ruler has triplicity dignity and is not peregrine.
• Mutual reception is not part of the check. Two planets in each other's signs are a separate condition, described on mutual reception and dispositor loops. Authors differ on how reception changes the interpretation of a peregrine planet, but it does not change the positional lookup here.
• Outer bodies are outside the test. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Lunar Nodes and Chiron have no domicile, exaltation, triplicity, bound or face in this scheme, so they are never called peregrine.
• It is not a score. The site does not add up dignity points, rank planets or name a strongest or weakest planet.

Some modern writers also use "peregrine" loosely for a planet with few or no aspects. That is a different idea; unaspected planet borderline cases keeps the two apart.

Worked peregrine checks

The three fictional charts below are the site's fixed example charts, recalculated with the routines behind the free chart. Sect comes from the day and night charts page.

Ruben: London, 5 January 1993, 12:00 GMT. Day chart.

Ruben's Mercury is a useful case: it has no sign-level dignity in Capricorn, but its own bound alone keeps it from being peregrine. His Jupiter is the opposite lesson: it rules air as the participating ruler, but that does not count as triplicity dignity in this check, and it has nothing else.

Noor: Amsterdam, 2 December 1992, 21:30 CET. Night chart.

Five of Noor's seven are peregrine under this convention. Three of them, the Sun, Venus and the Moon, are rulers of their elements but not the active ones in a night chart, which shows how much the sect rule decides. Her Mars is in its fall in Cancer and is still not peregrine, because it is the night ruler of water in a night chart.

Noor's Jupiter shows the display safeguard. It is printed at 9°59′ Libra, within a minute of the 10° line between Libra's first face (the Moon's) and its second (Saturn's), so the face cannot be named from the printed minutes. Here that does not affect the result: Jupiter rules neither face, and it has no other dignity in Libra, so it is peregrine on either side of the line.

Lotte: Utrecht, 27 August 1991, 06:55 CEST. Day chart, only just.

Lotte's Sun is held by its face alone, and her Mars by its bound alone. Her Jupiter depends on sect. Her chart became a day chart at 06:48; at 06:47 and earlier it is a night chart, and then Jupiter, as night ruler of fire, has triplicity dignity and is not peregrine. With her recorded 06:55 it is peregrine, but if her birth time could be ten minutes early, Jupiter's status is unresolved.

When the convention changes the answer

The result above belongs to the stated convention. Under Lilly's triplicity table, which gives water to Mars by day as well as by night, Ruben's Mars would have triplicity dignity in his day chart and would not be peregrine. That is a difference between two conventions, not two verdicts about Ruben. Using another term system, such as the Ptolemaic terms in Lilly's book, can change bound results in the same way. The point of stating one table and one rule is that anyone can repeat the check and get the same answer.

When the birth time is unknown

Without a birth time, a peregrine verdict needs every input to stay the same across the whole birth date, and for the active triplicity ruler that includes sect. Checking a single moment, or the start and end of the day, is not enough. For the examples here the calculation was run at every minute of each local birth date.

• Ruben's date. The Sun and Jupiter come out peregrine at every minute, by day or by night, and Mercury, Venus and Saturn are not peregrine at any minute. Mars changes with sect: peregrine while the Sun is above the chart horizon, from 08:13 to 16:00, and the active night ruler of water outside those times. Without a time, Ruben's Mars is unresolved. The Moon starts the day in Taurus, its exaltation, and enters Gemini at about 01:42, so its status is unresolved for the date too.
• Lotte's date. Her retrograde Mercury moves back across the 24° line in Leo at about 21:39, out of Mars's bound into its own. It is peregrine before that time and not after, so even a planet other than the Moon can be unresolved without a time.
• Noor's date. Her Jupiter crosses from the Moon's face into Saturn's at about 22:01, which does not change its result. Her Sun and Venus are peregrine only in a night chart, and her Mars only in a day chart, so all three are unresolved without a time. Her Moon, by contrast, changes bound and face during the day but is peregrine at every minute of the date, so in her case the Moon's result does hold without a time.

The Moon gets a result without a birth time only if the whole possible time range gives the same answer; otherwise it is unresolved. The free chart's noon reference for an unknown time is a reference position, not a birth time. A birth chart without a birth time and how accurate a birth time needs to be explain how to test a time window.

How bounds and peregrine planets were read

In Hellenistic astrology the bound lord was treated as having a say in how a planet acted, alongside the lord of its sign, and surviving horoscopes from Roman Egypt often record a planet's bound lord next to its sign ruler. Vettius Valens gave descriptions of individual bounds. Later authors, Lilly among them, mostly used bounds as one of the smaller dignities.

The peregrine planet was pictured as a stranger in the place where it stands, without the standing that a dignity gives. These are historical technical labels. A peregrine planet does not mean anything is missing in a person, and a dignified one does not mean anyone is gifted or fortunate; the labels say nothing about ability, health, success or events. Modern astrologers vary in whether they use bounds or the peregrine test at all.

Check your own chart

Open your free birth chart, settle whether it is a day or a night chart, and run the five questions for each of the seven traditional planets, starting with the triplicity step on triplicity rulers. The methodology page sets out how positions are calculated, and you can ask the Astrologist about a placement, bringing the degree and the bound you looked up.

Related articles

• Triplicity Rulers
• Planetary Dignities Explained
• Decan Rulers for All 12 Signs
• Domicile and Detriment in Astrology
• Exaltation and Fall in Astrology
• Day and Night Charts
• Unaspected Planet Borderline Cases