The Egyptian bounds

What it is

A bound, or term, is the finest of the five grades of essential rulership. Where domicile gives a planet a whole sign to govern and exaltation a sign of honour, the bounds cut each single sign into five unequal stretches, and hand each stretch to one of the five wandering stars: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury.

So every degree of the zodiac carries a bound lord just as surely as it carries a sign lord, but at a far closer grain. Cross a few degrees and the ruler changes. A planet standing in a degree its own body governs is said to be in its own bound, a modest but genuine dignity: the engine scores it a Term, worth +2.

The two luminaries hold no bounds at all. Neither the Sun nor the Moon shares in this division; the five non-luminaries parcel out the terms among themselves. The boundaries are read as half-open intervals, running from a start degree up to, but not including, the next. A planet at exactly 6° Aries has already left Jupiter's bound and entered the bound of Venus.

How the tradition computes it

The app uses the Egyptian scheme, the oldest of the term tables, which Ptolemy sets down in Tetrabiblos I.23. Each sign is divided into five bounds of unequal width, and both the widths and the order of the lords change from sign to sign, following no single rule of arithmetic. The complete sixty-bound table, five bounds for each of the twelve signs, stands below. Read each row from left to right as the degrees climb from 0° toward 30°.

To find any planet's bound lord, take its longitude within its own sign and locate the one interval that contains it.

bound lord = ruler of the half-open interval [start, end) holding the planet's degree

The engine stores these same sixty rows and reads the term off by that half-open lookup, so a degree that lands exactly on a boundary belongs to the bound above it, never the one below.

What it signifies

Each bound lord lends its own nature to the degrees it governs. A bound of Jupiter or Venus carries something of their temperate, fertilising warmth and moisture, the two benefics; a bound of Saturn is cold and dry, a bound of Mars hot and dry, the two malefics; a bound of Mercury takes the complexion of whatever is joined to it. So the bound refines the reading of any planet or point that falls in it: a benefic is strengthened further by sitting in a benefic's bound, a malefic sharpened in a malefic's. Because the grade is so fine, the bound is where a chart's detail lives; two births minutes apart can share every sign placement and still differ in one bound lord, and with it in the flavour of a degree.

The bounds carry a second, temporal office: the bound lord serves as the distributor in time-lord work. The Ascendant is directed forward through the zodiac at the classical rate of roughly one degree for each year of life, and as the directed Ascendant crosses out of one bound and into the next, it hands the years to the new bound lord, who becomes distributor for that stretch of the life. The distributor colours the theme of those years by its own nature and condition: a distributor that is a well-placed benefic promises easier years than one that is an afflicted malefic. In this app the distributor times life themes only, and never renders a verdict on the length of life.

Where the app departs

Seen in a real chart

Take the demo chart of Marcus Aurelius, a nocturnal birth with Pisces rising. Reading each of the seven planets against the sixty-bound table gives its bound lord, and in one case pins the exact term:

• Jupiter in Scorpio (9th house). This is the one placement the bundle fixes by dignity: Jupiter holds a Term in Scorpio, scoring essential +2, so it stands in its own bound, Jupiter's stretch of Scorpio from 19° to 24°. Jupiter is thus its own distributor there, a planet in its own term.
• Venus in Pisces (1st house), the chart lord, exalted. The Pisces bounds run Venus 0°-12°, Jupiter 12°-16°, Mercury 16°-19°, Mars 19°-28°, Saturn 28°-30°. Venus scores essential +4, exaltation alone with no term added, which tells us it does not also stand in its own Pisces bound; its bound lord is Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, or Saturn.
• Sun, Mercury and Mars in Taurus (3rd house). All three draw their bound lord from the same five Taurus stretches: Venus 0°-8°, Mercury 8°-14°, Jupiter 14°-22°, Saturn 22°-27°, Mars 27°-30°. The Sun rules no bound of its own, so its distributor is always one of the five; Mars in its detriment scores a clean -5, and because a term does not lift a planet already in its detriment, the score alone cannot say whether Mars reaches its own Taurus bound.
• Saturn in Cancer (5th house). The Cancer bounds run Mars 0°-7°, Venus 7°-13°, Mercury 13°-19°, Jupiter 19°-26°, Saturn 26°-30°. Saturn is in detriment here, scoring -5, so once again the score cannot confirm whether it reaches its own bound; the distributor is read generally from the five.
• Moon in Capricorn (11th house). The Moon holds no bounds, so wherever its degree falls among Mercury 0°-7°, Jupiter 7°-14°, Venus 14°-22°, Saturn 22°-26°, Mars 26°-30°, its bound lord is one of the five wandering stars.

Only Jupiter is confirmed in its own bound, and only because the bundle records its Term dignity; for the rest the reading names the sign's bound lords and stops where the degree is not given.

How to read it in the app

In the natal reading the bound lord shows up in each planet's dignity line, where a Term worth +2 marks a planet standing in its own bound, and again in the directions timeline as the distributor governing a stretch of years. A footnote pins the term table to Tetrabiblos I.23, so you can see at a glance which authority the reading rests on, and that the scheme in force is the Egyptian one.

Sources