The Lot of Exaltation, also called the Lot of Honour, is anchored not to a planet but to a fixed degree: the nineteenth degree of Aries, which is the degree of the Sun's exaltation in the classical scheme, from which the Sun's own position is subtracted and the result projected from the Ascendant. That construction makes it the clearest surviving link between the lots and the doctrine of exaltations, a scheme of dignities in which each of the seven planets has one sign, and in the more precise version one degree, of particular strength: the Sun in 19 Aries, the Moon in 3 Taurus, Jupiter in 15 Cancer, Mercury in 15 Virgo, Saturn in 21 Libra, Mars in 28 Capricorn and Venus in 27 Pisces. The exaltation degrees are attested in Babylonian material well before the Hellenistic period and are among the oldest elements in the whole system, though the reason for the particular choices is not known.
The exaltation degrees also carry a structural oddity that the lot inherits. Each of the seven is a single degree rather than a span, so the doctrine asserts a precision the rest of the dignity scheme does not: rulership belongs to a whole sign, the terms to spans of several degrees, and the exaltation to one degree in three hundred and sixty. Nothing in the surviving sources explains how those particular degrees were arrived at, and the Babylonian material that attests them earliest gives the positions without the reasoning. A lot anchored to one of them is therefore anchored to the oldest and least explained element in the tradition, which is part of what makes it interesting and part of what makes it impossible to argue about on the merits.