Domicile

Definition

A planet's domicile is the sign of the zodiac it owns — the sign in which it acts under its own authority, at home. The Greek word is oikos ("house, dwelling"), the Latin domicilium. The seven Hellenistic domicile assignments have stayed stable across the whole tradition: Moon in Cancer; Sun in Leo; Mercury in Gemini and Virgo; Venus in Taurus and Libra; Mars in Aries and Scorpio; Jupiter in Pisces and Sagittarius; Saturn in Capricorn and Aquarius. The two luminaries hold one domicile each; the five other planets hold two, split between a "diurnal" and a "nocturnal" sign. Domicile is the strongest of the five essential dignities. The sign opposite a planet's domicile is its detriment.

In Tradition

Astrologers in the Hellenistic and traditional schools rank domicile as the primary dignity, the foundation the other four (exaltation, triplicity, bound, face) stack on top of. A planet in its own domicile is, as Lee Lehman puts it, a captain in command of its own fate, setting the agenda for itself. Dykes contrasts it sharply with exaltation: the domicile lord is the hands-on administrator who actually runs the office and gets things done; the exalted lord is the absentee chair who makes executive decisions without doing the practical work. For delineating any topic of a house, traditional practice uses the domicile lord — not the exalted lord — as the planet that carries the matter.

In Practice

When you find one of your planets in its own domicile, read it as a place where that planet operates undiluted: its themes deliver more cleanly, the planet has resources to draw on, and it can be relied on to manage the topics it rules. The domicile lord of a house carries the affairs of that house — astrologers reading a chart in the traditional style identify the domicile lord of the rising sign (the chart ruler), of the house of marriage, of the house of career, and follow those planets through the chart as primary significators. Domicile is also the foundation of dispositorship — a planet not in its own sign is "disposed of" by the domicile lord of the sign it falls in, and reading those rulership chains is one of the workhorse moves of Hellenistic delineation. In dignity-point scoring schemes a planet in its own domicile earns +5, the highest single-dignity score.

Historical Origin

The seven-planet domicile table is attested across the entire Hellenistic primary-source corpus and remains unchanged through the Arabic and Latin transmissions. The Greek oikos and Latin domus / domicilium track the same concept; both originally named the planet's sign-as-dwelling and only later began to blur with sign-as-house-position. Robert Hand notes in Whole Sign Houses that this confusion — between domicile (a planet's sign) and house (a place counted from the Ascendant) — is a medieval-Latin development, not a Greek one. Greek astrologers used topos ("place") for the houses-by-Ascendant and reserved oikos for the planet's own sign.

Etymology

Origin: Latin (translating Greek). Meaning: A dwelling, a home; the sign in which a planet "lives".

Further Reading

• Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos
• Robert Hand, Whole Sign Houses
• Demetra George, Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice