Rulers at Degree
Every degree of the zodiac has up to five owners — the planets holding its domicile, exaltation, triplicity, term and face. Reading that short list tells you which planets have a claim on whatever stands there, and it is what reception is computed from.
The fuller picture
This is the same five dignities read from the other end. Instead of asking what a planet holds where it stands, you ask who owns the degree — and the answer is a list of up to five names, arrived at independently of which planet happens to be sitting there. Two of the five aren't fixed properties of the degree. The triplicity owner depends on the chart's sect, so the same degree has one owner by day and another by night. The term owner depends on which of the two traditional bounds tables you work. And the exaltation slot is often simply empty: only seven signs host an exaltation, so five of the twelve — Gemini, Leo, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Aquarius — have no exaltation ruler at all, and the list runs four long.
The reason to read it is that these are the planets a body standing there answers to. The domicile owner is that planet's dispositor — its landlord, in effect — and this list supplies the raw ownership facts from which reception is computed. Domicile or exaltation qualifies alone; a minor owner must also own at least one other distinct minor dignity at that degree. A peregrine significator owns nothing where it stands, and the owners of that degree are still there and still identifiable even when a lone minor owner does not amount to reception.
Which makes the dispositor's own condition a real piece of testimony rather than a footnote: the lord of your sign can't lend what he hasn't got. A dispositor sitting in its own dignity lends strength; one in detriment or fall cannot. The tradition builds a whole test on this. The source we follow presents a rule of Lilly's for judging whether an event is good or bad — assess the dispositor of the lights and the dispositor of the ruler of the first, and ask which of them would be the stronger if it were placed in the first house, whether or not it actually stands there. That last clause is unusual: a hypothetical placement used as a strength test. Applied in one worked chart, it decided between a dispositor peregrine in a cadent house and a dispositor dignified but retrograde, and the reading went with the second.
Sum the owners' weights at a degree — five for domicile, four for exaltation, three for triplicity, two for term, one for face — and the planet with the highest total is the almuten of that degree, the planet with the strongest overall claim on it. It is a useful thing to know for a rising degree, or for the cusp of the house the question turns on. And there is one arrangement where an owner is promoted from a score to a significator outright: in Bonatti's method for a five-way choice, the fifth option is read from the planet whose bound holds the degree of the relevant cusp, with the exaltation owner taking a slot when the sign has one. In that method the choice of bounds table changes which planet an entire option is read from, so it is the sharpest reason to know which table your chart used.
In your chart
Every planet in an iHorary chart carries its own map of the rulers at its degree, and that map is what the app computes reception from — the planet dossier names the dispositor, says whether an aspect actually connects the two, and reports whether the dispositor is itself in its own dignity or in detriment or fall. Receptions between the two significators are read off the same map in both directions and graded by kind, strongest first. The almuten at a degree is computed by summing the owners' dignity weights, with ties broken by the strongest single dignity held.
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