Sign

The fuller picture

Start with the job that carries the most weight. Read the sign sitting on a house's cusp, take the planet that rules that sign, and you have the significator of everything that house governs — so the whole cast of a chart is assigned through the signs. This is also where a beginner's shortcut fails. Houses are rarely a clean thirty degrees wide, so you can't count signs round from the rising one and expect them to land on the cusps. In one worked chart with Cancer rising, the ninth cusp falls in Aquarius rather than Pisces, which makes Saturn the ruler of the ninth — and Saturn himself is standing just over the line in the next sign, which changes nothing about his rulership. Read the cusp.

The twelve sort three ways, and each sorting is used for something different. Modality — cardinal, fixed and mutable, called moveable, fixed and common in older wording — is what the tradition times by. Cross the modality of the sign against the angularity of the house and you get the unit: cardinal in an angular house counts in days, fixed in a succedent house counts in years, and fixed in a cadent house is a refusal rather than an answer, because a span that long can't honestly be specified. The degrees left to run to the aspect give the number, and the sign gives the unit. Across three chapters of worked examples that grid held on fifteen of sixteen measurements, which is about as well as any timing rule in horary behaves.

Element does two jobs of its own. It sets the triplicity rulers, which is one of the five essential dignities and the only one that changes between a day chart and a night one. And it's read descriptively: significators mostly in fire signs point a career question at the trades involving fire and cutting, mostly in air at law, accounting, writing and surveying, mostly in earth at farming, building and service work, mostly in water at brewing, food and the sea. The element also decides whether a sign suits a planet's own nature at all. In one chart Saturn in Sagittarius is read as gaining nothing whatever from it, on the ground that nothing hot and mutable agrees with a cold, dry, rigid planet.

Then there's a set of sign attributes that has nothing to do with dignity and gets applied directly to the question. The water signs are the fruitful ones, and significators in them argue for children; Virgo and Gemini are named as barren, and a significator in its own sign but in a barren one describes somebody in good order in every respect except the one being asked about. The double-bodied signs — the common ones — argue for more than one of the thing, more than one child or more than one marriage, where fixed and moveable signs argue for exactly one. The last degrees of any sign are read as unlucky. And one stretch of the zodiac carries its own name and its own caution, the Via Combusta.

The third job is the easiest to miss. A planet has to finish its business inside the sign it occupies, and an aspect that would only perfect after it has left is normally not an aspect at all. That rule is what gives the void-of-course Moon any meaning, and the source we follow defends it hard — twice, against two earlier authors, it refuses to chase the Moon over the boundary to find her a further contact, because allowing that would empty the condition of content. The same author then does allow an aspect between two ordinary significators to perfect after both have changed sign, flags it in his own text as unorthodox, and uses it to carry the positive half of a marriage judgment. The two cases are never set against each other, so treat a perfection that needs a sign change as a real finding and a weak one. Signs govern whether an aspect exists at all, too: contact is counted in signs before it is counted in degrees, so two planets far apart in the same sign carry nothing, and planets in neighbouring signs are read as averse rather than mildly connected.