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For the first time in eleven days the ledger is not blank. The Moon holds Libra through the whole of today, six degrees along it by noon UTC, and the first ten degrees of that sign belong to her. Two percent of her face is lit, and rising now rather than falling.
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Face is the fifth and slightest of the essential dignities. Each sign is cut into three equal stretches of ten degrees, thirty-six in all, and each stretch was handed to a planet in the Chaldean order, slowest body to fastest, repeating around the circle. Start the count at Mars in the first ten degrees of Aries and follow it through, and the first ten degrees of Libra come out as the Moon’s. Anyone can check that with a pencil.
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It is worth almost nothing, which is precisely why it earned a row in the table. The seventeenth century English material likens a planet in its own face to a man standing in the doorway of a house he can barely claim: in possession, and close to losing it. Not strength. Standing.
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A second boundary falls in the same day. Around noon UTC her distance from the Sun opens past seventeen degrees and she comes out from under his beams, three days after going in. Guido Bonatti, in thirteenth century Italy, belongs to the line of writers who printed the thirty-six divisions as a table to be consulted rather than a doctrine to be defended. She leaves her own face at 17:49 UTC. Eleven hours of the smallest dignity the system has, and then back to nothing.
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