Jupiter
Jupiter is the brightest of the five true planets after Venus. It completes a sidereal circuit of the ecliptic in a little under twelve years, which means it advances by roughly one whole sign every year: a chart cast a year apart will generally find Jupiter one sign further on. That twelve-year period is plain arithmetic and needs no interpretation, and it is the exact fact that makes Jupiter useful for marking out stretches of time longer than a single year, independently of any interpretive claim about what such a period means.
The synodic period, the interval between one opposition and the next, is about 399 days, a little over a year, so an opposition falls a little later in the calendar each time and Jupiter is well placed for observation across most of most years. Its retrograde episodes last around four months and are far less abrupt in appearance than Mars’s, described at Mars, because Jupiter’s much greater distance means Earth’s own faster motion changes the viewing angle far more gradually.
The names
The Greek descriptive epithet is Phaethon, “the blazing one” or “the shining one”, applied before the planet was identified with Zeus, following the same two-stage pattern as the other four visible planets 1. The Latin name is Iuppiter, and the Romance weekday names preserve the god rather than the epithet, as they do for the other four true planets.
Gap in the evidence
The most common Akkadian name for Jupiter is written SAG.ME.GAR. Its pronunciation and meaning have not been settled, and competing readings of the individual signs have been proposed 1. It is reported here as an open reading.
A better-understood alternative Akkadian name is Nēberu, “the crossing”, associated with the god Marduk; this reading is likelier than SAG.ME.GAR’s but rests on a narrower evidentiary base than the fully corroborated Babylonian names carried elsewhere on this site, and is marked here accordingly 1. Jupiter’s identity as the star of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, is well corroborated independently of either name 1, and the pairing follows a pattern: the brightest of the slow-moving planets was assigned to the state’s principal deity, in the same way the Sun was assigned to Shamash and the Moon to Sin among the luminaries.
Dignities
| Domicile | Sagittarius, Pisces |
|---|---|
| Detriment | Gemini, Virgo |
| Exaltation | Cancer, at 15 degrees |
| Fall | Capricorn, at 15 degrees |
| Triplicity | Fire (by night); Air (participating) |
| Bounds held (Egyptian) | Aries 0-6Taurus 14-22Gemini 6-12Cancer 19-26Leo 0-6Virgo 17-21Libra 14-21Scorpio 19-24Sagittarius 0-12Capricorn 7-14Aquarius 13-20Pisces 12-16 |
Jupiter takes Sagittarius and Pisces by domicile, the second pair out from the Cancer and Leo signs held by the luminaries, on the side of the scheme opposite Mercury’s Gemini and Virgo. The table above also shows Jupiter exalted in Cancer, one of the Moon’s own domiciles, and falling in Capricorn, one of Saturn’s; and it shows Jupiter holding two triplicity roles at once, night ruler of the fire triplicity and participating ruler of the air triplicity, on the Dorothean scheme this site takes as its default. The whole symmetric arrangement, and the parts of the wider dignity apparatus that are textually contested, are set out in Essential Dignity.
Sect
Jupiter is a diurnal planet, and it is the benefic of its own sect in a chart of the day and the benefic contrary to sect in a chart of the night. Sect covers the apparatus this rests on and its recovery in modern traditional practice 2.
Tradition
Held byClaudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos bk. I ch. 4, Alexandria, c. 150 CE
Of the seven planetary passages in this chapter, Jupiter’s is the most structurally revealing about Ptolemy’s method. He derives the temperance from the planet’s position between its two neighbours: “Jupiter has a temperate active force because his movement takes place between the cooling influence of Saturn and the burning power of Mars. He both heats and humidifies; and because his heating power is the greater by reason of the underlying spheres, he produces fertilizing winds” 3 bk. I ch. 4. The order of the spheres does the explanatory work here, which is the clearest single piece of evidence in the chapter that Ptolemy’s planetary doctrine is a physics of position. Mars and Saturn report Ptolemy’s parallel treatment of Jupiter’s two neighbours.
Gap in the evidence
Whether Lilly’s chapter on Jupiter in Christian Astrology adds anything specific to Jupiter beyond the fixed template characterised at Saturn, nature, colours, trades, body parts, diseases, places and persons signified 4 bk. I, has not been verified against the primary text for this entry, and no content beyond that general structural fact is asserted here. The same caution applies to any claim that Lilly ranks Jupiter above Venus as the more favourable of the tradition’s two benefics: the ranking is widely repeated in secondary literature, but this entry has not checked it against Lilly’s own wording and so does not print it as a quotation or as a settled fact.
References
- Claudius Ptolemy, trans. F. E. Robbins. Tetrabiblos. Loeb Classical Library 435. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940 (composed c. 150 CE). bk. I ch. 4. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
The standard English reference and the chapter-numbering scheme this site adopts and names. Non-Robbins reprints number the chapters differently, so every locus here is given as Robbins numbering.
- William Lilly. Christian Astrology. London, 1647 (composed 1647). bk. I. https://archive.org/details/b30338724 recordprimary source
Second edition 1659. Where a figure differs between the two printings this site says which printing it is quoting.
- Chris Brennan. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune: Amor Fati Publications, 2017. ISBN 9780998588902 recordscholarly
A practitioner-scholar synthesis: comprehensive and well referenced, but not peer-reviewed philology. This site cites it with that characterisation.
- Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume I: The Ancient and Classical Worlds: Continuum, 2009. ISBN 9781441127372 recordscholarly
The standard single narrative survey. Volume I first appeared as The Dawn of Astrology, Hambledon Continuum, 2008. The subtitle is "The Ancient and Classical Worlds", not "The Ancient World"; the shortened form is widely miscited.