Out of bounds

Meaning

Over the year the Sun swings between two limits north and south of the celestial equator. It reaches the northern one at the June solstice and the southern one at the December solstice, about 23°26′ either side, never more. That limit is the tilt of the ecliptic to the equator, the obliquity. The Moon and the planets, whose paths lean a little off the Sun’s, can sometimes go past it. A body beyond the Sun’s reach, north or south, is said to be out of bounds.

Modern astrology reads such a body as stepping outside the Sun’s territory, the field of the usual rules. What it stands for is read as acting more freely: original, independent, unpredictable, hard to contain or to ignore. An out-of-bounds Mercury may think in unusual ways; an out-of-bounds Venus may love or create outside convention; an out-of-bounds Moon may feel strongly and in its own manner. These are readings of style and intensity, never of misfortune.

In practice

• The Moon goes out of bounds most often. Around its major standstill, every 18.6 years, it passes the limit for a few days twice a month, for several years in a row; around its minor standstill it does not go out of bounds at all.
• Mercury, Venus and Mars, which can stray several degrees from the ecliptic, go out of bounds fairly often, for days, weeks or sometimes months at a time. The slower planets do so rarely.
• How far matters: a body a few minutes of arc beyond the limit is read as only just outside it; one several degrees out, as strongly so.
• With other factors: an out-of-bounds body is read in its sign, its house and its aspects as usual. Its parallels to other bodies, measured in the same declination, are often read with it.

Origin and history

Astronomers have known since antiquity that the Moon and the planets cross the Sun’s tropics, since their paths are tilted to the ecliptic. Reading that as a condition of its own is modern. Twentieth-century astrologers who worked with declination brought it into practice, and Kt Boehrer’s book of 1994, Declination: The Other Dimension, did much to spread it. The limit itself is not fixed: the obliquity shrinks slowly, by about 47″ a century, and was larger in the past, as Jean Meeus’s formulas show.

How Ulune calculates it

• The limit is the true obliquity of the ecliptic on the date of the chart, from the Swiss Ephemeris: about 23.44° now, 23.45° in 1900, 23.47° in 1800. A chart saved before Ulune kept the obliquity falls back on 23.44°.
• A body is out of bounds when the size of its declination, north or south, is greater than that limit. Declinations come from the Swiss Ephemeris, latitude included, for the planets, Chiron, the asteroids, Eris, Sedna, Lilith and the nodes. The nodes, the angles and the Vertex lie on the ecliptic and can never pass the limit.
• The Table’s Points part shows, under the declination, how far beyond the limit the body is, to the second of arc, or to the minute without a birth time. A wheel overlay can mark every out-of-bounds body.
• Without a birth time, a body whose declination could change enough over the day is marked ~.

Correspondences