Planet

The fuller picture

The switch from natal astrology is the thing to get straight first. A natal chart reads a planet as part of somebody's makeup. A horary chart reads it as somebody in a situation, at one moment, in one matter — and the reading is about the situation. Which planet plays which part is settled by house rulership, and that assignment has its own page. What this page is about is the second half: once a planet has a part, how do you read the state it's in.

Two registers, always both. Essential condition is what the planet holds in the zodiac where it stands, which the tradition treats as its capacity to deliver. Accidental condition is everything else: which house it occupies, whether it's moving forward or backward, fast or slow, lost in the Sun's rays or clear of them, sitting with a benefic or besieged between two malefics. The procedure weighs both, separately, for each of the three principals — the planet standing for the person asking, the planet standing for the thing asked about, and the Moon — and it does that before anyone looks at the aspects between them.

The vocabulary the tradition uses for those states is deliberately about people in circumstances, and it repays taking literally. A retrograde planet is read as somebody ill and asking for help. A cadent planet is read as somebody with no motion in them at all. A planet with real dignity stuck in a cadent, difficult house is read as a powerful person who is vexed and frightened — the strength is genuine, and the surroundings are what stop it landing. None of those are decorations on a score. They are the reading, and they are what a well-judged chart hands back to the person who asked.

One principle ties the two registers together and it is worth carrying about: the more a planet agrees with its surroundings, the more fully it acts. A benefic strongly dignified, angular, moving forward and in a helpful aspect to a significator delivers about as much good as a chart can offer, because nothing in its situation is working against its nature. Run the same reasoning on a difficult planet and you get a result most beginners have backwards, which is why it has its own page. The general form is what matters here: agreement between a planet's nature and its circumstances amplifies whatever that nature is, and disagreement is what produces the frustrated, thwarted readings.

Two limits on the word itself. Only seven bodies rule anything — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon — so only seven can be actors in the strict sense, and the outer planets are plotted and read as witnesses without ever holding a part. And a planet's promise is not entirely its own: the tradition holds that each planet delivers according to the freedom the ruler of its sign allows it, so the condition of that ruler is a fact about this planet and not a separate topic.