Calculating Final Dispositor Based On Signs, Cusps, Houses

I am confused by the "final dispositor" thing. As far as I am aware, there are three different ways to do it:

1) by sign. You look at the sign the planet is in and then find where the ruler of that planet is, until you get to an end. Simple.

2) by house. You look at the house the planet is in, and you use the relation of that house to a sign (eg house 1 = aries, etc), and use that to find the next house ruler. This one gets kind of sticky, but the Pullen calculator will do that for you.

3) by cusp. It's essentially the same as by sign, except instead of finding the ruler of the sign the planet is actually in, you look for the ruler of the sign of the cusp of the house is in. Eg if you have Mercury in Libra but it's in 8th house that starts in Leo, you go looking for the sun next instead of Venus.

Needless to say all of these can produce very different answers. Is there a best way to do it?

By sign. I don't think house rulerships play a part in that.

Besides, which house a planet is in can vary depending on which house system is used to construct the chart. Which sign a planet is in is indisputable, unless the birth took place right around the moment a planet transited to another sign and there's any possibility that the birth time is off (which there usually is; even carefully recorded birth times can be off by a few minutes).

Osamenor said:

By sign. I don't think house rulerships play a part in that.

Besides, which house a planet is in can vary depending on which house system is used to construct the chart. Which sign a planet is in is indisputable, unless the birth took place right around the moment a planet transited to another sign and there's any possibility that the birth time is off (which there usually is; even carefully recorded birth times can be off by a few minutes).

Click to expand...

If sign rulerships are the only ones that count, then why does Pullen Astrolog make charts based on house rulerships at all? I mean surely someone must use them...

Do you have a link? I've never seen Pullen Astrology's charts based on house rulerships, I don't think.

Osamenor said:

Do you have a link? I've never seen Pullen Astrology's charts based on house rulerships, I don't think.

Click to expand...

Astro.com > extended chart selection > Pullen/Astrolog and then select House/Sign Dispositor Graph. The two righthand ones show house dispositors.

Interesting. I guess it's a different system.

To be honest, I have no idea what practical purpose the house dispositors serve, and little idea of what the sign dispositors really do. The only place I've used them much is in south/north node interpretations, where the dispositor of the south node tells you something about the south node story and the dispositor of the north node is a clue as to how to get there.

I looked at the Pullen dispositor charts for my chart, and it's interesting: if I use sign dispositors, Mercury is the final dispositor of everything in my chart except the sun. If I use house dispositors, the final dispositor of everything is a loop-de-loop of Pluto, Jupiter, and Mercury. Either way, Mercury is pretty darn powerful, more than I would've thought just from its position in my chart.

I do see Mercury being pretty powerful for me. The surprise is Pluto. Just from its position in my chart, it doesn't look that strong. But it rules my north node, and my eighth house is the busiest... so there you go.

Yeah, but the weird thing is that aside from this generator I haven't seen anything actually written about house dispositors. I thought maybe they were in a book or something.

Also with house dispositors, Pullen doesn't consider being close to the cusp of a house to be in that house, so if you have cuspy planets you will probably want to recalculate by hand.

They probably are in a book or something. I've just never run across that book.

The only planet I have close enough to a house cusp to possibly have its house placement questioned is Jupiter. The Pullen graphs I drew for my chart said it was disposited by Mercury, evidently placing it in the third house. My Jupiter is within two degrees of the IC, so conjunct, which makes it rather fourth house no matter what, I would think. However, it's retrograde, so it was moving further into the third house at the moment of my birth, not towards the fourth.

You might want to recalculate anyway. Considering Pullen's delineation program calls a Mars less than half a degree from the ascendant and in major aspect to 7 planets "a minimal influence", I'm not really inclined to trust their accuracy that much.