Egyptian Bounds Calculator — Which Planet Owns Your Exact Degree

What bounds or terms are

A bound is a run of degrees inside a sign ruled by one of the five planets visible to the naked eye: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury. The Sun and Moon, being lights rather than wanderers, never receive bounds in this system.

The stretches are unequal. In Aries, Jupiter holds degrees one through six, Venus seven through twelve, Mercury thirteen through twenty, Mars twenty-one through twenty-five, and Saturn closes the sign at twenty-six through thirty.

Your bound lord is whichever planet owns the stretch your exact degree falls in. It is one of the five essential dignities, and in the classical tally it is worth two points, ranking below triplicity and above face.

The Egyptian table and how we verified it

We use the system Ptolemy labels Egyptian, the one Dorotheus teaches and the one actually found on surviving Greek horoscopes. The definitive modern survey is Jones and Steele's study in ISAW Papers 1.

Two independent checks guard the table in our engine. First, every sign must tile its thirty degrees exactly, with five contiguous stretches and no gaps. The probe asserts this for all twelve signs.

Second, the tradition assigns each planet a maximum lifespan built from the degrees of bounds it rules: Saturn 57, Jupiter 79, Mars 66, Venus 82, Mercury 76. Summing our table reproduces all five numbers exactly, which is very unlikely to happen by accident.

A placement sitting precisely on a boundary, say Aries 6°00', is counted inside the stretch that ends there, matching the ancient inclusive convention.

What the report returns

The calculator prints one row per body and point:

• Each planet, plus the Ascendant, Midheaven and Part of Fortune, with its degree and sign.
• The bound stretch it falls in, shown as a degree range within the sign.
• The bound lord, tinted green for the benefics, rose for the malefics.
• A footnote of the Aries pattern so you can see how the table breathes across a sign.

A worked example: Saturn's grip on two angles

For the London chart of 1 January 2000, 17:30 UT, the Ascendant stands at 28.8° Cancer. Cancer's bounds run Mars to seven, Venus to thirteen, Mercury to nineteen, Jupiter to twenty-six, Saturn to thirty. So the Ascendant's bound lord is Saturn.

Jupiter at 25.3° Aries sits in the stretch closing Aries, twenty-six through thirty, also Saturn's. Jupiter there receives Saturn as its term lord, worth two points in any dignity tally.

Meanwhile Saturn itself, at 10.4° Taurus, is in the Mercury stretch of nine through fourteen. Saturn rules its own bound at the Ascendant but stands in another's at its seat, a normal and instructive split.

Two nicer details complete the picture. The Midheaven at 3.3° Aries falls in Jupiter's opening stretch. And Mercury, at 2.3° Capricorn, sits in Capricorn's first stretch, which Mercury owns, one of the few ways Mercury gains bound dignity so early in a sign.

What the bound lord says

The tradition treated bounds as the dignity of circumstances. Domicile tells you who a planet is; the bound tells you which neighbor hosts it at that exact degree, and what flavor the hour carries.

A benefics-ruled bound softens its occupants. Jupiter's or Venus's stretch lends growth, favor or warmth to whatever stands there, even when the resident is a malefic. Saturn's or Mars's stretch adds a price: delay, effort, friction, or a spine of steel depending on the question.

Because the same bound lord receives everyone in its stretch, bounds group strangers together. In our example, the Ascendant, Jupiter and Mars all answer to Saturn's closing stretches, one reason traditional astrologers read Saturn as quietly co-authoring that chart.

Historically bounds also carried timing. Distributions through the bounds hands the years of life to the bound lords of the Ascendant in table order. That chronocrator engine is a separate build; this page fixes the table it would need.

What this tool does not claim

Several bounds systems existed: the Egyptian, the Ptolemaic, and variants attached to Porphyry, Apollinarius and others. Ptolemy rejected the Egyptian table he inherited, and modern software is split between them. Results here will not match pages that run Ptolemaic terms.

We report static bound lords only. The full distribution technique, which assigns age-spans to each lord from the Ascendant, is not computed on this page.

The Sun and Moon hold no bounds in this system, so the lights always show another planet as their term lord. That is a feature of the table, not missing data.

Our method in one line

Positions come from sub-arcsecond astronomy (VSOP87/ELP via astronomy-engine), read through Porphyry quadrant houses (whole-sign available on every chart). The bounds table is pinned by two structural probes, exact tiling of all twelve signs and reproduction of the traditional planetary lifespan sums. Every worked-example figure is reproduced by that probe. Reviewed by Dr. Amara Osei, Astronomy Reviewer.