Sign Aquarius, one degree
Phase Waxing gibbous
Condition Peregrine
The word to know today
Accidental dignity
Essential dignity asks one question: is the planet at home in this sign. Accidental dignity asks a different set entirely, about circumstance rather than address. Where the planet falls in the chart, how quickly it moves, whether the Sun’s light has swallowed it, and, for the Moon, whether she is gaining light or losing it. The two columns were tallied separately and were allowed to contradict each other.
Strength in the old tables came in two kinds, and the writers were careful not to mix them. The Moon stands at one degree of Aquarius, waxing gibbous, more than half lit and still filling. Aquarius gives her nothing by essential dignity, the column that measures rulership, exaltation, detriment and fall. She rules Cancer. She is exalted in Taurus. Aquarius is none of these, so by that reckoning she is peregrine here, a planet abroad, holding no office in the sign it crosses.
The second column is accidental dignity, and it counts conditions rather than addresses. William Lilly, writing in London in 1647, laid these fortitudes and debilities out in tables a reader could total up like an account, adding for one condition and subtracting for another. A Moon increasing in light sat on the credit side. The idea long predates him. The Hellenistic material already sorted the waxing Moon toward matters of increase and the waning Moon toward matters that were meant to diminish, and Dorotheus of Sidon leaned on that division when choosing hours to begin things.
So the two columns disagree tonight. Essentially she is unsponsored, one degree into a fixed air sign that answers to Saturn. Accidentally she is gaining. The tradition did not settle such splits by averaging them into a verdict. It recorded them as they stood: a planet with no standing, doing well.
From the shelf
William Lilly, Christian Astrology
Published in London in 1647, it turned the inherited doctrine of planetary strength into tables a working astrologer could add and subtract.

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