If you're just tuning in, please check out #DignityBabes to follow along with our schedule of conversations (see image below). My colleagues will be posting smart af delineations on wtf Essential Dignity really is? What I wish to contribute to the collective voice is my favourite way of demonstrating the conversations that take place in a chart through the Rulership scheme of Essential Dignity.
The concept of planets having an affinity with signs showcases the planet's inherent access to its own power & resources. Signs are the way they are because of the Planets that rule them (not the other way around!). I also like to think of them not just RULERS or LORDS - as some of the official terms - but as PARENTS of signs. Chances are if you have a family of origin (which all of us do despite their absence and presence in our lives), you can trace back the conditions and circumstances of the life you've lived as a child without the supposed agency you possess as an adult. This is my favourite way of entering a birth chart reading with clients.
Simply put, the traditional PARENT PLANET & CHILD/REN SIGNS constellations are as follows:
Sun - Leo
Moon - Cancer
Mercury - Gemini & Virgo
Venus - Taurus & Libra
Mars - Aries & Scorpio
Jupiter - Sagittarius & Pisces
Saturn - Capricorn & Aquarius
The luminary leaders of the day, Sun & of the night, Moon each get one, while the rest of the traditional planets get one DAYTIME sign and one NIGHTTIME sign. Essential Dignity composes a sophisticated geometric pattern that feels like a portal into the divine.
My invitation to you is to start connecting the dots in your own charts. Slowly but surely, you can start to see that a web of conversations and relationships start to emerge. This is something we call a DISPOSITOR TREE.
The interesting thing about being a PARENT is the RESPONSIBILITY that comes with the role. You can say, that the planets are always looking after their signs. Whether they have the CAPACITY to, is another story. Essential Dignity is THE HEART of assessing Planetary Condition (as Demetra George calls it in her HIGHLY RECOMMENDED book Ancient Astrology In Theory and Practice Volume I, 2019). Essential Dignity is but one of the many steps of assessing a planet’s capacity to deliver its natal significations.
As the weeks go on and our conversations evolve, I hope to write about our subjective understanding of the language-ing inherent in this system that can cause confusion and perhaps a feeling of doom. But for now, what I want to focus on is how planets carry out their HOSPITALITY with each other.
So homework invitation: in your chart, looking at the rulership I outlined above, start to do a DISPOSITOR TREE and see who's hosting who. That's it. No need to intellectualize it too much.
What I was aiming to get at is to show you the complexity of the web of relationships that planets have with each other. Just like our families of origin, they are complicated, a landmine of pain, a deep well of un/loved potential and at the same time, a garden of possibilities for the future we dream of. I personally don't think we can truly decipher the TOTALITY of a person's chart in one lifetime. But that's just me.
How does your chart’s dispositor tree look like? Let me know in the comments if you tried tracing it out. Join our Essential Dignity conversation by tagging your post with #DignityBabes.
