Combust and cazimi

Meaning

A planet close to the Sun in the zodiac disappears from view, lost in the Sun’s glare. Tradition reads this as a real condition of the planet. Near the Sun it is combust, from the Latin for “burnt”, and its own voice is drowned out by the Sun’s.

A combust planet is read as weakened, hidden or overpowered. Its themes may be at work out of sight, hard to judge from the outside, or bent to the will and identity the Sun stands for. It is an accidental condition, not an essential one: it comes from the planet’s place relative to the Sun, not from its sign.

At the very centre, the reading turns around. A planet within about a quarter of a degree of the Sun is cazimi, “in the heart of the Sun”. Tradition reads it as raised up and strengthened, like a favourite admitted to the king’s presence.

A wider zone surrounds both. Older authors called a planet under the beams when it was close enough to the Sun to be invisible but outside combustion. They read it as weakened too, but less than when combust.

In practice

• Mercury is often combust, since it never strays more than about 28° from the Sun. Many read a combust Mercury as a mind closely bound to one’s own will, quick but hard to step back from.
• Venus, never more than about 47° from the Sun, is combust around its conjunctions with it, about every nine and a half months.
• The Moon is combust for less than a day on each side of the New Moon. Tradition reads this dark of the Moon as a time of withdrawal before a new start; see Moon phase.
• Cazimi moments are brief, and many astrologers watch them in transits and elections as small windows of clarity for the planet involved.
• Direction matters to tradition. A planet moving away from the Sun, about to reappear, is read as stronger than one moving into its beams.

Across traditions

• Indian astrology calls combustion asta, setting, and treats a combust planet as weakened. It gives each planet its own distance from the Sun rather than one fixed orb.
• Hellenistic astrologers weighed a planet’s phase with the Sun: rising before it, setting after it, or hidden in its rays.

Origin and history

Hellenistic texts speak mostly of a planet under the beams, usually within about 15° of the Sun. At that distance a planet is lost to the eye. Medieval astrology drew a narrower zone of combustion inside it, and a tiny one of cazimi at its heart. The word cazimi reached Latin from Arabic.

William Lilly, in Christian Astrology (1647), gives the limits in his introduction. A planet is combust within 8°30′ of the Sun, under the beams up to 17°, and cazimi within 17′. In his horary volume he gives slightly different figures, 12° for the beams and 16′ for cazimi. He counts combustion among a planet’s accidental debilities and cazimi among its fortitudes.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune measures the distance between a planet and the Sun along the ecliptic, by longitude only. A planet within 17′ of the Sun is marked cazimi. A planet more than 17′ but no more than 8° away is marked combust. Ulune does not mark the wider zone under the beams. Nor does it look at whether the planet is moving towards the Sun or away from it.

The test covers the Moon and every planet, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto included, but not small bodies, points or angles. Combust and cazimi appear in the table’s notes with the exact distance from the Sun. On the wheel, the overlay draws a ring: dashed for combust, solid for cazimi. They are not added to Lilly’s points, which in Ulune count essential dignity only. Without a birth time, the note is marked ~ when it could change during the day.

Correspondences