Peregrine

The fuller picture

There is one test and it is a single question: at this exact degree, does the planet hold any of the five — domicile, exaltation, triplicity, term or face? If it holds one, it is essentially dignified. If it holds none, it is peregrine. Dignified and peregrine are two names for the two sides of one predicate rather than two separate judgements, which is what makes the edge cases worth getting right. Most of them gather around triplicity: rulership of an element out of sect earns nothing at all, so the Moon in an earth sign is dignified by night and peregrine by day, while a participating ruler doesn't care which sect it is. The others sit on the term boundaries, where the two traditional bounds tables put different planets in charge of the same few degrees.

Now the distinction this page exists for. Peregrine does not mean debilitated. Detriment and fall are specific, hostile relationships to a sign — the planet has a standing there and it is a bad one. Peregrine is the absence of any relationship: nothing in this sign answers to this planet, for good or ill. A planet can be peregrine while holding neither debility, which is the ordinary case, and a planet in detriment is not a wanderer but something more particular and usually worse. Our engine keeps them apart by construction: the peregrine test requires no dignity and also no detriment and no fall, deliberately, both because a bad relationship is still a relationship and because counting a planet as fallen and wandering at once penalised one placement twice.

What it reads as, in practice, is a lack of internal resource — desperate, lost, unsupported, with nothing in the surroundings that belongs to the planet. It is at its most useful read against the accidental state, because the two answer different questions. A peregrine significator in an angular house describes someone with every external resource and no capacity of their own; in a missing-person chart the same combination read as a man disoriented but physically nearby. Reversed, a peregrine planet in a cadent house is weak on both counts and reads as having no power over the outcome at all. Reception can lift it: a peregrine significator that another planet receives is in a better state than one nobody has a claim on.

A peregrine significator does not settle a question, and the traditional rule lists are the reason to be careful here rather than confident. Peregrination appears in them as one item in runs of debilities — combust, or cadent, or peregrine, or retrograde — and blocks of that shape have been recorded firing on their own author's worked examples and pointing the opposite way from the judgment he reached. Both significators peregrine is a genuine two-body testimony in its own right, and the conclusion attached to it is that the outcome will often be challenging, which is a weighting rather than a verdict. Where two option significators are equally weak, the tradition ranks them by four further tests instead — above the horizon beats below, a cadent house that aspects the rising degree beats one that does not, a planet aspecting the rising degree beats one that does not, and a bodily conjunction with your own dispositor beats a reception by aspect.