Page 37 - Talented Astrologer • Volume 2 Number 1 • Winter 2019

Astrology has a long tradition of political factions. In 17th century England, your religious affiliation determined which house system you used. If you were Catholic, you used Placidus, but if you were Protestant (like William Lilly), you used Regiomontanus. Astrologers today still debate the merits of the many different
house systems, but houses no longer divide the astrological community. The two main astrological factions are Traditional and Modern. And what separates the two astrological political parties is rulership.
On the face of it, the argument is straightforward. Modern astrology assigns Uranus rulership over Aquarius, Neptune over Pisces, and Pluto over Scorpio, while in traditional astrology, Saturn rules Aquarius, Jupiter rules Pisces, and Mars rules Scorpio. Almost every astrologer has strong feelings about rulership, and it’s not uncommon for debates about rulership to get quite nasty.
This topic is so heated because every astrologer accepts that rulership is of fundamental importance, yet few astrologers understand what it means or how to apply it practically. There’s a lot to untangle here.
We’ll start by differentiating between the different meanings and applications of rulership. Next, we’ll consider the history of modern rulership. Finally, we’ll evaluate the practical applications of both modern and traditional rulerships.
Part 1: What Is
Rulership?
Today, Rulership has come to describe the relationship between a symbol in astrology and the things it represents. We use rulership to describe the
relationship between planets and signs (Mars rules Aries), between planets and houses (Saturn rules the second house), and between houses and things in the physical world (the second house rules money). We need to clean up this definition. It’s imprecise, and it’s a source of quite a lot of confusion.
Only planets can be rulers.
The concept of rulership goes back thousands of years, and none of the source
material was written in English. The ancient Greeks used two words to describe
rulership: oikiodespotes, which roughly translates to “domicile master” or more broadly, “ruler” and
kurios, which means “Lord.” Winter 2019 37