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Two of the seven planets receive no bounds at all, and the Moon is one of them. She holds Scorpio through the whole of today, fifteen degrees along it by noon UTC, still in her fall. Twenty percent of her face is lit.
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Bound is the fourth of the five essential dignities and much the strangest of them. Every sign is cut into five unequal stretches, each given to a planet, but the roll call runs Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and stops. The two lights are simply left out. So where domicile, exaltation, triplicity and face are all rungs the Moon can reach somewhere in the circle, this one is closed to her at every degree of it.
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Which set of bounds to use was never agreed. One arrangement came down from Egypt and served as the working standard for most of the tradition; Ptolemy printed a different one, and the two do not put the divisions in the same places. That is why the same degree turns up assigned to different planets in different books, and why a careful writer names the system before quoting a boundary. She crosses several today. None of them are hers.
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The bounds carried real weight where precision did: in deciding which planet had the better claim on a particular degree, and in the old techniques that counted a chart forward degree by degree to measure a span of life. Vettius Valens, working in the second century, uses them without pausing to justify them. She is running slow as well today, under thirteen degrees against an average a little above it, and she stays in Scorpio until Wednesday afternoon.
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