Triplicity

The fuller picture

Each of the four elements has a day ruler and a night ruler, and in some schemes a third, participating ruler as well. Work out whether the chart is diurnal or nocturnal — the Sun above or below the horizon — and read the ruler for that sect. A planet ruling the element of the sign it stands in holds triplicity, worth three points, which puts it third on the ladder behind domicile and exaltation. It's the weakest of the three dignities that count as major, and that boundary matters more than it looks.

Here is the part that matters most, and it is a genuine trap: rulership out of sect earns nothing at all. The Moon rules the earth triplicity by night, so a Moon in an earth sign in a night chart is dignified — and the same Moon on the same degree of Virgo in a day chart is peregrine, holding nothing. One worked example turns on exactly that, with the Moon called essentially debilitated on the ground that the chart is diurnal. A participating ruler is the exception in the other direction: where a scheme has one, it counts in either sect. So the same planet, on the same degree, can be dignified in one chart and a wanderer in the next, purely because of the hour the question was asked.

Triplicity is also where the major and minor split bites. On the working thresholds the practitioner sets out, a planet holding triplicity and nothing else is straightforwardly essentially dignified, while term or face alone leaves it only weakly so. Against the standard five-four-three-two-one scoring, triplicity on its own clears his three-point line and a term or a face on its own does not. He applies this in practice: a significator with only participating triplicity is read as middling but clear-eyed, not as strong.

There is one method where the triplicity rulers stop being a score and start being the cast. When a question offers a choice between named options, the class of thing being chosen between takes a house, and the triplicity rulers of the sign on that cusp become the significators of the options, in sect order — in-sect ruler first, out-of-sect second, participating third, assigned to the options in the order the person asking gave them. Mars is always the third earth ruler in any chart, day or night, which is the kind of invariant that makes the method teachable. This is the one place where sect decides which planet stands for what rather than adjusting a number, so it is the one place where getting the sect wrong swaps the answer instead of nudging it.

A last caution about tables. The triplicity assignments are not agreed. Lilly's table, which is Ptolemy's, gives Mars rulership of water both day and night and has no participating ruler for any element; the Dorothean scheme gives water to Venus by day and Mars by night, with a third ruler for each element. Both are in the engine, and a chart cast here uses Lilly's — his two rulers per element, with no participating ruler to score at all. That is a deliberate choice rather than an inherited one: the rest of this glossary works Lilly's dignity ladder, and running his ladder over somebody else's triplicities is a hybrid no source argues for. Dorothean is offered as the selectable alternative, and choosing it gives you all three of his rulers, the participating one scored at reduced weight. The one cell where the two tables actually disagree is water by day — Mars on Lilly's, Venus on the Dorothean. The table in force is recorded with the chart, so a figure cast before the default moved keeps and reports the table it was really computed on.