Planetary Bounds and Terms: The Egyptian Table, Checked

Traditional

Somebody built this table to a specification and then died without telling anyone what the specification was.

Here is what we can prove. Add up every degree Saturn holds across all twelve signs of the Egyptian bounds and you get 57. Saturn's traditional greater years: 57. Jupiter, 79 and 79. Mars, 66 and 66. Venus, 82 and 82. Mercury, 76 and 76. The five totals add to exactly 360.

That is a checksum. Any bounds table you find on the internet can be tested against it in about four minutes, and a surprising number of them fail. Ptolemy's rival set fails it.

And the reason the degrees fall where they fall? Brennan's answer, stated flatly, is that the logic of the allotment remains a mystery. Two thousand years of astrologers using a table nobody can generate.

What The Bounds Are

Every sign is cut into five unequal stretches of degrees, and each stretch belongs to a different planet. Where your planet falls inside its sign decides which of those five planets sets the terms it operates under.

The Greek word is horia, and it carries limitation and restriction as well as spatial or territorial boundary. The Latin tradition translated it as termini, which is where the English "terms" comes from. Robert Schmidt popularised "bounds" and later switched to "confines." All three words name the same thing.

Brennan calls the bounds the most important and most widely used of the zodiacal subdivisions. Demetra George's teaching image is the one that makes them click: if the sign is a school, the bound lords are the individual teachers in each classroom, each setting the rules for that room.

The Egyptian Bounds, All Twelve Signs

There were as many as nine competing systems, but one set is standard. The Egyptian bounds are used by Dorotheus, Valens, Firmicus, Paulus and others, and by nearly all the surviving ancient horoscopes. Alexander Jones reports the Egyptian set is the only one found in the Oxyrhynchus papyri, and Neugebauer and Van Hoesen report the same with one exception from a literary source.

Read "0 to 6" as the first six degrees of the sign.

Sign	1st bound	2nd bound	3rd bound	4th bound	5th bound
Aries	Jupiter 0 to 6	Venus 6 to 12	Mercury 12 to 20	Mars 20 to 25	Saturn 25 to 30
Taurus	Venus 0 to 8	Mercury 8 to 14	Jupiter 14 to 22	Saturn 22 to 27	Mars 27 to 30
Gemini	Mercury 0 to 6	Jupiter 6 to 12	Venus 12 to 17	Mars 17 to 24	Saturn 24 to 30
Cancer	Mars 0 to 7	Venus 7 to 13	Mercury 13 to 19	Jupiter 19 to 26	Saturn 26 to 30
Leo	Jupiter 0 to 6	Venus 6 to 11	Saturn 11 to 18	Mercury 18 to 24	Mars 24 to 30
Virgo	Mercury 0 to 7	Venus 7 to 17	Jupiter 17 to 21	Mars 21 to 28	Saturn 28 to 30
Libra	Saturn 0 to 6	Mercury 6 to 14	Jupiter 14 to 21	Venus 21 to 28	Mars 28 to 30
Scorpio	Mars 0 to 7	Venus 7 to 11	Mercury 11 to 19	Jupiter 19 to 24	Saturn 24 to 30
Sagittarius	Jupiter 0 to 12	Venus 12 to 17	Mercury 17 to 21	Saturn 21 to 26	Mars 26 to 30
Capricorn	Mercury 0 to 7	Jupiter 7 to 14	Venus 14 to 22	Saturn 22 to 26	Mars 26 to 30
Aquarius	Mercury 0 to 7	Venus 7 to 13	Jupiter 13 to 20	Mars 20 to 25	Saturn 25 to 30
Pisces	Venus 0 to 12	Jupiter 12 to 16	Mercury 16 to 19	Mars 19 to 28	Saturn 28 to 30

Brennan's table is sourced to the original verse text of Dorotheus, via Hephaistio, Apotelesmatika, 1, 1. The Aries row is confirmed independently three times over, in Brennan's prose walkthrough, in George's prose walkthrough and in Louis's printed table.

One row deserves a note, and it is a live example of why you check. Louis's printed Scorpio row gives Saturn in the fourth bound and Mars in the fifth, which puts Mars in the sign twice, drops Jupiter entirely and breaks the arithmetic below. Louis's own running prose four pages earlier restores Jupiter to the fourth bound, and George's glyph table has Jupiter fourth and Saturn fifth. The row printed above is the reading that satisfies both.

The Four Structural Rules, Which Work As A Checksum

The bounds have no known generating rule, but they do have four hard structural properties. Any table you import from anywhere should be tested against them before you trust it.

One. Five planets per sign, and never the luminaries. Only Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury appear. The Sun and the Moon are excluded from the Egyptian set entirely.

Two. A malefic always sits at the end of every sign. Saturn closes Aries, Gemini, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Aquarius and Pisces. Mars closes Taurus, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Capricorn. Twelve of twelve, no exceptions. The last degrees of every sign in the zodiac belong to a malefic, which is either profound or a scheduling accident and nobody can tell you which.

Three. The benefics get more total degrees than the malefics.

Four, and this is the strong one. Each planet's total across all twelve signs equals its greater or complete years. The figures are given by Paulus, Introduction, 3, and echoed at Rhetorius, Compendium, 49.

Planet	Total degrees across the zodiac	Greater years
Saturn	57	57
Jupiter	79	79
Mars	66	66
Venus	82	82
Mercury	76	76
Sum	360	360

The table above passes this exactly, planet by planet, and closes on 360. That is not automatic. The uncorrected Scorpio row also sums to 360 while giving Saturn 56, Jupiter 74 and Mars 72, so the checksum is a real test rather than a formality. A wrong table can still add up to a circle.

There is a fifth pattern that is only a tendency. The first bound tends to go to a planet with a rulership in the sign. Brennan names the cases: in Taurus, Gemini, Virgo, Scorpio and Sagittarius the domicile lord takes the first bound, and in Libra and Pisces the exaltation lord does. That is seven signs of twelve. The five misses are Aries, Cancer, Leo, Capricorn and Aquarius. Ptolemy noticed the same loose pattern and criticised the set for its inconsistency (Tetrabiblos, 1, 21: 2-4).

The Counting Trap

This is where people make mistakes, and George warns about it explicitly in her text.

The Greeks had no zero, so each sign begins with the first degree. A planet at 0 Aries 10 is in the first degree of Aries. A planet at 6 Aries 03 is in the seventh degree. When George states the Aries bounds in words she says Jupiter takes the first six degrees and Venus the seventh to the twelfth, which in modern longitude means Jupiter runs from 0 degrees 00 minutes to 6 degrees 00 minutes and Venus begins at 6 degrees 01 minutes.

The practical rule: a boundary degree belongs to the earlier bound. Louis's zero based table and George's one based prose describe exactly the same spans. Only the labelling differs, and if you get this wrong you will hand the wrong planet a dignity at every boundary in the zodiac.

Why The Distribution Is What It Is

Nobody knows, and the honest answer is the interesting one.

Brennan states flatly that there is no clear systematic rationale underlying the distribution of the Egyptian bounds, and that the logic of their allotment remains a mystery. The four rules above are constraints the set satisfies, not a recipe that generates it. George prints the table and explains how to read it without offering a generating rule. Louis prints it and does not attempt one.

What can be said is that the arithmetic is not loose. The greater years requirement is exact to the degree across all five planets, which means whoever built the set was working to a real constraint, whatever it was. Somebody had a reason. The reason did not survive.

The attribution to "the Egyptians" is usually taken to mean the Nechepso and Petosiris texts, though Jones and Steele have argued for a possible earlier Mesopotamian origin.

What The Bounds Do

The technique they were built into first was the length of life method, and Brennan speculates that this may be why they are called bounds at all, with the planets marking out the limits of a lifetime. Paulus says explicitly that the Egyptian sages used the bounds to determine the Master of the Nativity and from that the length of life (Introduction, 3).

They came to be used more generally as a subdivision carrying the qualities of the ruling planet. Planets are more auspicious in their own bounds, and Valens gives delineations for each of them in Anthology, 1, 3. Brennan's image: if the sign is the planet's house, the bounds are individual rooms in it controlled by different planets.

George pushes the image further and gives it teeth. The bound lord, which she also calls the oikodespotes, ruler of the household, sets the terms, rules and limits for any planet residing there. A benefic bound lord sets lenient parameters. A malefic bound lord sets strict and harsh ones, demanding high standards with a penalty for failure. She adds a qualification worth keeping: if Saturn is a functional benefic in that chart, or is exalted where he has dominion by bound, the enforced hard work can produce mastery of a difficult skill.

A planet in its own bounds sets its own rules of operation and is not subject to another's authority. George's image is a student on an independent study, setting their own course, schedule and evaluation.

The bound lord's condition also modifies the domicile lord's verdict. George cites Rhetorius for the rule that a planet in the domicile of a malefic but in the bounds of a benefic has its fortune benefited, and a planet in the domicile of a benefic but in the bounds of a malefic has its good reduced.

There is one more place the bounds carry unusual weight. A planet is not hindered by being under the beams of the Sun as long as it is in its own domicile, exaltation or bounds. This condition is called the chariot, lampene, evoking a covered chariot that shields the rider from the Sun (Antiochus, Summary, 14; Porphyry, Introduction, 25; Rhetorius, Compendium, 43). Antiochus says a planet in its chariot can still be powerful, dunatos, even under the beams. The standard range for under the beams in the Hellenistic tradition is fifteen degrees either side of the Sun.

Ptolemy's Rival Set, Which Fails The Test

Ptolemy criticised the Egyptian bounds, then criticised another set he attributed to the Chaldeans, then introduced a third which he claimed to have found in an old damaged manuscript (Tetrabiblos, 1, 21: 20-30). The scholarly view Brennan reports is that Ptolemy is usually thought to be inventing his own set here. Stephan Heilen concludes there is "a considerable probability that Ptolemy himself invented" the third system. An old damaged manuscript that nobody else ever saw.

It found few followers until the Renaissance, when Lilly and his contemporaries adopted it. The one major Hellenistic exception is Hephaistio, who lists Ptolemy's bounds after those of Dorotheus.

Sign	1st bound	2nd bound	3rd bound	4th bound	5th bound
Aries	Jupiter 0 to 6	Venus 6 to 14	Mercury 14 to 21	Mars 21 to 26	Saturn 26 to 30
Taurus	Venus 0 to 8	Mercury 8 to 15	Jupiter 15 to 22	Saturn 22 to 26	Mars 26 to 30
Gemini	Mercury 0 to 7	Jupiter 7 to 14	Venus 14 to 21	Saturn 21 to 25	Mars 25 to 30
Cancer	Mars 0 to 6	Jupiter 6 to 13	Mercury 13 to 20	Venus 20 to 27	Saturn 27 to 30
Leo	Saturn 0 to 6	Mercury 6 to 13	Venus 13 to 19	Jupiter 19 to 25	Mars 25 to 30
Virgo	Mercury 0 to 7	Venus 7 to 13	Jupiter 13 to 18	Saturn 18 to 24	Mars 24 to 30
Libra	Saturn 0 to 6	Venus 6 to 11	Jupiter 11 to 19	Mercury 19 to 24	Mars 24 to 30
Scorpio	Mars 0 to 6	Jupiter 6 to 14	Venus 14 to 21	Mercury 21 to 27	Saturn 27 to 30
Sagittarius	Jupiter 0 to 8	Venus 8 to 14	Mercury 14 to 19	Saturn 19 to 25	Mars 25 to 30
Capricorn	Venus 0 to 6	Mercury 6 to 12	Jupiter 12 to 19	Mars 19 to 25	Saturn 25 to 30
Aquarius	Saturn 0 to 6	Mercury 6 to 12	Venus 12 to 20	Jupiter 20 to 25	Mars 25 to 30
Pisces	Venus 0 to 8	Jupiter 8 to 14	Mercury 14 to 20	Mars 20 to 26	Saturn 26 to 30

This set does not satisfy the greater years checksum. Summed across the zodiac it gives Jupiter 80 where the rule wants 79, and Mars 65 where the rule wants 66. Saturn, Venus and Mercury match, and the total still closes on 360, so the discrepancy is a single displaced boundary between a Jupiter bound and a Mars bound. Two readings are available and neither is settled here: either the greater years rule was a property of the Egyptian set that Ptolemy never intended to satisfy, or the printed table carries a one degree error.

No sign is identical between the two systems. Four signs keep the same ruler order with different boundaries, and eight change the order outright. Louis's demonstration of why that matters is concrete: in the Palchus horary the Moon sits at 18 Scorpio, which is Mercury's bound in the Egyptian set, and Palchus read books and papers into the ship's cargo. In Lilly's Ptolemaic set the same degree is Venus's bound, and the cargo would have read as clothing and luxury goods. Same chart. The ship is carrying completely different freight depending on which table is open.

Not everyone kept them at all. Morinus, a contemporary of Lilly, reviewed the literature and decided not to use the terms, on the grounds that they were superstitious nonsense, and dismissed the faces along with them.

What To Actually Go Do

Open whatever software you use, find one planet, and check its bound lord against the Egyptian table above. Then check what your software thinks the bound lord is. If they disagree, your software is running Ptolemy and you should know that about it.

Then run the checksum on any bounds table you were planning to trust. Pick one planet, add its degrees across all twelve signs, and compare against 57, 79, 66, 82 and 76. It takes four minutes and it is the only place in astrology where you can definitively mark a source wrong with arithmetic.

Last, look at who holds the bound your Moon is in, and read George's rule against it. Lenient parameters or strict ones with a penalty for failure. That is the room your Moon is doing its work in.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is The Difference Between Bounds And Terms?

Nothing. "Terms" comes from the Latin termini and "bounds" from the Greek horia, and Schmidt also uses "confines." They name the same five unequal divisions of a sign.

Which Bounds Should I Use?

The Egyptian set is what Dorotheus, Valens, Firmicus and Paulus used, and it is the only set found in the surviving ancient horoscopes. The Ptolemaic set is what Lilly used. Louis's own conclusion on the choice is blunt: different systems yield different interpretations.

Why Are The Sun And Moon Left Out?

No source explains it. It is simply a structural property of the Egyptian set that only the five non luminary planets receive bounds.

What Does My Bound Lord Mean?

It is the planet that sets the operating conditions for anything at that degree. George's rule is that a benefic bound lord sets lenient parameters and a malefic one sets strict parameters with a penalty for failure.

What Happens If A Planet Is In Its Own Bounds?

It sets its own rules rather than working under another planet's terms, which George treats as autonomy. It also counts as a chariot condition that protects a planet from being under the beams.

Continue Learning

Next: decans and faces and essential dignities in astrology.

Topics covered

planetary boundsterms in astrologyegyptian boundsbound lordastrology terms table

Planetary Bounds and Terms, or the Table with a Checksum Built into It