Thread by @edwardW2

1/ In traditional western astrology, you must often assess the essential dignities of the planets skyscript.co.uk/dignities.html
As there are five levels of essential dignity, keeping track of such things often gets messy

In this thread I will show how it can be managed

2/ to prevent this thread from becoming unduly long, i will omit a discussion on what essential dignity is. The most comprehensive introduction available online is here skyscript.co.uk/dignities.html

3/ But to summarise; under this system the planets are assigned 'rulership' of parts of the zodiac. They can rule signs, or groups of signs; or indeed, stretches of signs.

A planet in a degree which it rules is strengthened. Conversely, planets may be weakened in certain signs

4. To keep track of what planet 'owns' what, i use a table. Its rows are the entered the planets; its columns are the 5 levels of essential dignity
(I use 7 planets here for simplicity)

5. lets fill this table in with the chart for the great conjunction , 2020 in London.

Consider Saturn, ayt 0 Aqu 29 Its dispositors are as such:
Sign - Aqu, ruled by Saturn
Exaltation: N/A
Triplicity: Mercury (night)
Bound: Saturn
Face: Venus

I enter Saturn's row with thus:

If you repeat the process with the rest of the planets, you get this:

From thence, it is very easy to see which planets have essential dignity, and which are peregrine (i.e. no dignity), So, Saturn and Mars both rule the signs they are in; under Lilly's system they score +7...

Similarly, you can easily see the Moon is peregrine, for she rules none of the divisions of essential dignity.

A slightly more complicated example is the Aries ingress chart for London 2021: The chart and its dispositor table are shown side-by side.

In this chart, Mercury is in its fall and detriment (Pisces)...

Rather than placing the detriment/fall as a separate column, I would rather place them as notes under the sign/exaltation columns; this saves space, and besides, prevents the possibility of mistakes if you want to do a dispositor analysis.

In fact, if you really want to save space, you can make do with just four columns, relegating the exaltation/fall to notes in the 'sign' column.

This table is also very useful-- indeed, the only manageable way-- of calculating the "almuten"/ eclipse lord

https://twitter.com/edwardW2/status/1272585678287585280

https://twitter.com/edwardW2/status/1353332618570256385

As a final note, it is possible to create a kind of "checklist" for the layers of acciedntal dignity in a similar fashion: here is one for Lilly. Each column in the yellow section is for a planet, and you put a check in the relevant box:

<this listing of accidental dignity comes from Lilly's Christian Astrology>