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Where This Term Falls in Capricorn

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Where This Term Falls in Capricorn

This is the fourth of the five terms, or bounds, into which the Egyptian table divides Capricorn. It runs from 22 degrees of the sign to 26, a stretch of 4 degrees held by Saturn. It opens where Venus's term closes at 22 degrees, and it gives way to Mars's term at 26 degrees, so a planet moving forward through Capricorn leaves Venus's bound and enters Saturn's at 22 degrees exactly.

Set out in degree order, the five terms of Capricorn run Mercury (0-7), Jupiter (7-14), Venus (14-22), Saturn (22-26) and Mars (26-30). At 4 degrees it ties with Mars as the narrowest of the five, against a widest of 8 held by Venus. The unevenness is not an accident of copying. No sign in the Egyptian table divides its five terms equally, and no two signs divide them the same way, which is why the table has to be consulted rather than derived.

The five rulers are the five planets visible to the naked eye. The sun and moon take no terms at all in this system, so each sign is shared out among Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, every one of them holding exactly one stretch of it. A planet standing anywhere between 22 and 26 degrees of Capricorn is standing in Saturn's bound, and Hellenistic technique reads the lord of the bound from the degree occupied rather than from the sign as a whole. The table this atlas follows is the Egyptian one, transmitted by Vettius Valens in his Anthologies and recorded by Claudius Ptolemy in the Tetrabiblos, which stayed in ordinary use after Ptolemy set out his objections to it and offered boundaries of his own.

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