Peregrine

a planet holding none of the five essential dignities in its sign

What the tradition reads

A planet is called peregrine, from the Latin for a foreigner or a wanderer, when it holds none of the five essential dignities in the sign it occupies: not domicile, not exaltation, not triplicity, not term and not face. It is the plainest condition a placement can be in, without the sign's cooperation and without a claim on any office there, home, honour and standing all withheld at once. Lilly's Christian Astrology scores peregrine as a Debility in its own table of the planets' fortitudes and debilities, set alongside detriment and fall rather than apart from them, and his own worked nativity lists a peregrine planet under that same heading with its own point value: the condition is counted against a planet, not left unscored. Wikipedia's Essential dignity page states plainly that being entirely peregrine, without any essential dignity whatever, "was considered a malefic condition," and that the one function Lilly gave face rulership was to keep a planet from falling into it. The tradition reads such a planet as working without the sign's cooperation and without its resistance either: its business gets done, but plainly, without the ease of a home ground or the intensified colour of an exaltation. Older judgement astrology treated a peregrine planet, especially if otherwise poorly placed, as needing outside support from favourable aspects to function well at all.

The story

Essential dignity as a whole assigns each sign a ruling planet, along with subordinate rulers by exaltation, triplicity, term and face, so that every degree of the zodiac carries some planet's claim upon it. Peregrine status is the negative space that scheme necessarily creates: once every sign has been divided among rulers, exaltations, triplicities, terms and faces, there remain placements where a planet holds none of these offices at all. Wikipedia's Essential dignity page records that Hellenistic astrologers such as Ptolemy and Vettius Valens weighted domicile, exaltation, triplicity and term as equally strong, while later astrologers such as Bonatti and Lilly ranked domicile first, treated face as barely worth counting, and kept its one surviving function as guarding a planet against falling fully peregrine. The word peregrinus itself is a name astrology borrowed rather than coined; the sources consulted for this entry do not explain the borrowing, so this entry states only what those sources themselves record: that the condition was, by Lilly's own scoring and by the tradition's later judgement, a debility, one the astrologer weighed against the rest of the chart around it rather than a fact treated as neutral from the outset.

Written from

Corpus key dignity:peregrine.