Sagittarius First Term: Jupiter

The sign of Sagittarius is divided into five unequal terms, or bounds, in the Egyptian table of planetary terms transmitted by Vettius Valens in his second century Anthologies and recorded by Claudius Ptolemy in the Tetrabiblos, Book I. Running in degree order from the start of the sign, Sagittarius's five terms are ruled in this sequence: Jupiter (0-12), Venus (12-17), Mercury (17-21), Saturn (21-26), Mars (26-30).

Ptolemy's own discussion in the Tetrabiblos presents the Egyptian table alongside at least one rival term system, sometimes called the Chaldean, and Ptolemy proposes his own revised set of boundaries distinct from both, a three-way divergence that later Hellenistic and medieval astrologers continued to debate. The table this atlas follows for Sagittarius and the other eleven signs is the Egyptian version Valens transmits, which remained the version in ordinary use among Hellenistic astrologers long after Ptolemy raised his own objections to it.

Within Sagittarius the widest term belongs to Jupiter, spanning 12 degrees, and the narrowest to Mercury, spanning 4 degrees, an unevenness that holds across all twelve signs in the Egyptian table: no sign's five terms are ever divided equally, and the five ruling planets, the five visible to the naked eye rather than the sun and moon, are distributed sign by sign rather than in one fixed order repeated throughout the zodiac.

A term, or bound, is one of five traditional dignities Hellenistic astrology assigns a planet within the zodiac, alongside domicile, exaltation, triplicity and decan (or face). Where domicile and exaltation give a planet its strongest standing across a whole sign or a single degree, the term is a narrower, five-way division of each sign, and a planet found within its own term in Sagittarius is read in this system as holding a minor but real dignity there, weaker than ruling the sign outright but stronger than holding no dignity in that stretch of degrees at all.

The dignity systems were never fully uniform across the Hellenistic and medieval periods, and terms were among the most contested of the five: Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos openly weighs the Egyptian table against a rival, sometimes called Chaldean, before proposing yet a third set of boundaries of his own, a three-way disagreement recorded in the primary sources rather than a modern reconstruction. The Egyptian table, the version this atlas follows for Sagittarius and the other eleven signs, is the one Vettius Valens transmits in his Anthologies and the version that remained standard in ordinary astrological practice despite Ptolemy's own reservations about it.

Because the five dignities work together rather than in isolation, a planet's term in Sagittarius is read alongside whatever domicile, exaltation, triplicity and decan it also holds at that degree, the combined picture across all five, not the term alone, being what traditional technique treats as the planet's overall standing at that point in the sign.