Almuten Figuris

Definition

The almuten figuris — the "almuten of the figure" — is the single planet that comes out strongest when you total its essential dignities across five key points of a chart: the Sun, the Moon, the Ascendant degree, the Lot of Fortune, and the degree of the lunation just before birth. Each candidate planet is scored at each of the five degrees on the standard 5-4-3-2-1 scale — domicile +5, exaltation +4, triplicity +3, term +2, face +1, using the triplicity ruler that fits a day or night chart. Whichever planet sums highest across all five points is the almuten figuris.

In Tradition

In medieval Arabic-Persian and Latin practice, the almuten figuris is read as the lord of the nativity — one planet whose nature and condition stamp the whole chart. The method treats the five points as the five most concentrated stand-ins for the person: the two lights, the rising degree, the chief Lot, and the lunation that linked conception to birth.

In Practice

To find it, you first work out the five reference degrees — the birth Sun, the birth Moon, the Ascendant degree, the Lot of Fortune, and the most recent New or Full Moon before birth (the prenatal syzygy). At each of these five degrees you total every planet's dignity score, adding 5 for domicile, 4 for exaltation, 3 for the sect-appropriate triplicity, 2 for term, and 1 for face wherever the planet rules. You then sum each planet's five scores, and the planet with the highest grand total is the almuten figuris. Its condition — its sign, house, aspects, whether it is retrograde or combust, whether it is on the chart's team — is read as the dominant signature of the chart. The procedure is most carefully followed in traditional horary and birth-chart work; in modern use it is often shown alongside the simpler "chart ruler", the lord of the rising sign, as an alternative or companion lord of the nativity.

Historical Origin

The five-point almuten figuris is documented across the medieval Arabic-Persian transmission — Masha'allah, Abu Ma'shar, Sahl ibn Bishr, and al-Biruni's Kitab al-Tafhim of 1029 — and codified in Bonatti's Liber Astronomiae (c. 1277), Tractate II, Part II, Chapter XIV, "On Finding the Significator of the Thing Sought". The Latin transmission keeps several names — almutes, almutem, dominator — for the al-mubtazz family of lord-of-degree calculations. The modern traditional revival follows Robert Hand's "Almuten Figuris" essay and the Project Hindsight translations.

Further Reading

• Guido Bonatti, Liber Astronomiae
• Al-Biruni, Kitāb al-Tafhīm
• Robert Hand, On the Heavenly Spheres