Exaltation
A planet is exalted when it occupies its sign of exaltation — the second-strongest essential dignity, worth four points. It reads as a planet raised and honoured by an arrangement it did not make, rather than one at home in its own right.
The fuller picture
There are exactly seven exaltations, one for each traditional planet: the Sun in Aries, the Moon in Taurus, Mercury in Virgo, Venus in Pisces, Mars in Capricorn, Jupiter in Cancer and Saturn in Libra. That leaves five signs — Gemini, Leo, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Aquarius — with no exaltation ruler at all, which sounds like trivia until a method needs one. Bonatti's ladder for splitting a five-way choice between significators hands one option to the exaltation ruler of the relevant house, and it carries a separate arrangement for the case where the sign on that cusp has none.
The difference between exaltation and domicile is worth stating precisely, because both are strong and they are not the same kind of strength. Domicile is ownership. Exaltation is preferment — being raised by someone else's favour, which is why one worked reading treats exaltation as closer to promotion than domicile is, in a chart about exactly that. It also carries a surface quality. An exalted ruler of the tenth described a business that looked extraordinarily good from outside, on prime real estate in a busy area, while the money was running the other way. Being honoured and being resourced are different things.
The image an exalted planet takes depends partly on the question. The tradition's stock reading of an exalted Moon is a proud, haughty, extravagant figure; one practitioner notes he normally reads her as the most down-to-earth of the exalted planets, and then keeps the extravagance because the question was about a televised game show. That is a dignity image being selected by the subject rather than recited, and it is how these five words are meant to be used. Exaltation is also compatible with a sober, limited self-assessment: an exalted significator can describe someone who knows perfectly well what they can and can't do, which is not the same as confidence.
One implementation detail that a definition never mentions. Each exaltation has a traditional exact degree — the Sun at 19° Aries, the Moon at 3° Taurus, Saturn at 21° Libra, and so on — and some authorities weight a planet on that degree more heavily. Our engine stores those degrees but scores exaltation by sign alone, so a Sun at 19° Aries and a Sun at 2° Aries earn the same four points here. Fall is exaltation's opposite, and the two are worth reading as a pair: the sign opposite a planet's exaltation is where it is dishonoured.
In your chart
The dignities table gives exaltation its own column at four points, second only to domicile, and the planet dossier names it in the strongest-first list of dignities a planet holds. Where one significator sits in the other's sign of exaltation, iHorary records a reception by exaltation and grades it just below a reception by domicile, since a planet's exaltation is a weaker claim on it than its own house.
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