Term (Bound)

The fuller picture

Terms are the first of the two degree-level dignities, and they are irregular by design. Each sign is cut into five segments of unequal width, and the segments are owned by the five non-luminary planets only: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. Across all sixty slots in the zodiac, the Sun and Moon own no term at all — in either of the two tables the tradition hands down. On the Egyptian table the slices run from two degrees wide to twelve; on the Ptolemaic they run from three to eight. Holding one is worth two points, which places term fourth on the ladder, above face and below triplicity.

What a term actually buys is narrower than the word "dignity" suggests. The practitioner's own gloss is that a term doesn't give a planet more power — it lets the planet be more like itself. That is a real distinction: a significator in its own term is recognisable, consistent, acting in character, and still without much capacity to force anything. On his working threshold, three points with the planet clear of detriment and fall, a term on its own falls short at two, though a term plus a face together clear it. He treats term and face as the minor dignities and is explicit that calling a planet dignified on one of them overstates the case.

Now the part any practitioner needs to know before trusting a term reading: there are two tables and they disagree. The Egyptian bounds and the Ptolemaic bounds put different planets in charge of the same handful of degrees, and both are legitimate traditional attributions. Our engine computes terms on the Ptolemaic table by default and has the Egyptian table implemented and selectable. Ptolemaic is the default because it is the table Lilly prints and judges by, and the practitioner whose doctrine the rest of this glossary follows works it too. The disagreements are concrete rather than theoretical: 27°55′ of Gemini belongs to Saturn on the Egyptian table and to Mars on the Ptolemaic, and around 14° of Taurus the owner is Jupiter on one and Mercury on the other. In each of those cases the planet in question has no other dignity available, so the choice of table is the whole difference between a dignified significator and a peregrine one. If a chart's term reading is load-bearing, check which table it was computed on.

The term table also quietly explains something the tradition usually just asserts: why the end of a sign reads as unlucky. The final term of every single sign belongs either to Saturn or to Mars. Not one of the twelve has a benefic in its last slice, and that holds in both tables — twenty-four cases out of twenty-four. A planet drifting towards the end of a sign is walking into the property of one of the two malefics, whichever sign it happens to be in, which is a structural fact rather than a superstition about a degree number. It also suggests the sharper way to state the late-degree rule: what matters is the planet having reached the final term of wherever it sits, and that boundary falls between 24° and 28° depending on the sign and the table.

One method promotes the term ruler from a score to a significator. In Bonatti's arrangement for a five-way choice, where the sign on the relevant cusp has no exaltation ruler, the fifth option is signified by the planet whose bound holds the degree of that cusp. That is the only place in the whole doctrine we have ingested where a term owner stands in for something rather than adding two points — and it is where the Egyptian-versus-Ptolemaic question stops being a scoring nicety and changes which planet an entire option is read from.