Cazimi

The fuller picture

Cazimi is a narrow condition and worth stating narrowly. A planet within 8°30′ of the Sun is combust: hidden, overwhelmed, unable to act. Keep closing, and at seventeen arcminutes — under a third of a degree — the reading reverses completely. The planet isn't lost in the Sun's glare any more; it's standing at the centre of it, and it's read as being at its strongest. Our own narratives borrow the traditional image and call it the king's heart: seated beside the throne rather than shouted down in the audience chamber. In scoring terms the reversal is exact and slightly absurd — the same boundary separates the largest positive mark a planet can earn by circumstance from the largest negative one, and it's seventeen minutes wide.

Where the condition comes from is worth being straight about. Cazimi is a Lilly and Bonatti condition carried by our engine, not a rule of the modern practice the rest of this glossary leans on. In the whole of the source we worked through there's exactly one chart where a planet is cazimi by measurement — Mercury seventeen arcminutes from the Sun — and the author doesn't use the word, doesn't invoke the condition, and says only that Mercury has recently separated from the Sun. That isn't a contradiction; nobody has argued against cazimi. But an absence of dispute isn't the same as corroboration, and this page shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Two practical notes. Cazimi describes the condition of one planet; it doesn't answer a question. A cazimi significator is a well-placed actor, which is a real fortitude and not a verdict — whether the matter comes about still turns on the contacts between the significators. And our measurement is taken in ecliptic longitude alone, with no test of latitude, so a planet seventeen arcminutes from the Sun in longitude counts as cazimi here even if it's some distance from the Sun in the sky. Whether that's the right test is a fair question, and one we haven't settled.