Dignity

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What the tradition reads

Dignity is the general name astrology gives to a planet's condition of strength or weakness by virtue of the sign and degree it occupies, independent of anything else in the chart. Wikipedia's Essential dignity page lists five traditional essential dignities: domicile, a planet in a sign it rules outright; exaltation, a sign in which the planet is read as unusually elevated though not at home; triplicity, rulership shared among the signs of one element; term, one of five unequal divisions of a sign assigned individually to different planets; and face, the same division the tradition also calls the decan. Opposite the first two strengths stand two corresponding weaknesses, detriment, the sign opposite a planet's domicile, and fall, the sign opposite its exaltation; a planet holding none of the five dignities at all is called peregrine. Hellenistic astrologers such as Ptolemy and Vettius Valens weighted domicile, exaltation, triplicity and term as being of equal strength; it was the later, post-classical tradition of astrologers such as Bonatti and Lilly that introduced a hierarchy, ranking domicile as most important, exaltation slightly less so, triplicity still fairly significant, and term much diminished, with face rulership almost entirely ignored except for its one surviving function, keeping a planet from turning fully peregrine. The dignities most commonly used by astrologers today, per the same source's own table, are domicile, detriment, exaltation and fall, without triplicity, term or face.

The story

The dignities as a formal, cumulative scoring system belong to the Hellenistic astrology of the centuries before and after Ptolemy, whose Tetrabiblos sets out the domiciles, triplicities, exaltations and terms of the planets across a run of consecutive chapters in Book I, treating a planet's dignity as fundamental to reading its strength in any judgement. Wikipedia's Essential dignity page groups Vettius Valens with Ptolemy as an astrologer who weighted domicile, exaltation, triplicity and term equally, in contrast with the hierarchy later astrologers imposed. Lilly's Christian Astrology of 1647 gives the scoring practice its clearest surviving form in English, a printed table assigning a fixed point value to each dignity and debility, domicile, exaltation, triplicity, term and face set against detriment, fall and peregrine, so that a planet's overall essential strength could be totalled as a single number. The much simpler modern habit of naming only a planet's rulership, exaltation, detriment and fall, without reference to triplicity, term or face, developed, according to the same Wikipedia page, from the eighteenth century onward, as astrology's popular audience widened and its technical apparatus was correspondingly pared back.

Written from

Corpus key glossary:dignity.