Essential Dignities API
Essential dignities measure how comfortably each planet sits in the sign and degree it occupies. This endpoint runs every body through the five-fold traditional scheme — rulership, exaltation, triplicity, term, and face — together with the two debilities, and returns both a per-planet breakdown and a single weighted total.
Essential Dignities API
Given a birth moment and place, the endpoint locates each planet by sign and degree, then scores it against the Ptolemaic dignity tables that medieval and Hellenistic practice inherited. It checks the five essential dignities in descending strength — domicile rulership, exaltation, triplicity rulership for the chart's sect, the term or bound the degree falls in, and the face or decan — and the two essential debilities, detriment and fall, where a planet sits opposite its rulership or exaltation. Each planet receives the conventional dignity points for every condition it meets, the debilities subtract, and the figures roll up into a per-body breakdown under data.dignities plus a chart-wide totalScore. The result tells you not just which sign a planet is in but how dignified or weakened it is there, distinguishing a planet in its own home from one merely passing through a sign it has no claim on.
POST/v1/essential-dignities
curl -X POST https://api.astroway.info/v1/essential-dignities \
-H "X-Api-Key: aw_live_..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"date": "1990-05-15",
"time": "14:30:00",
"timezoneOffset": 3,
"latitude": 50.45,
"longitude": 30.52
}'{
"ok": true,
"data": {
"dignities": [
{
"planet": "Venus",
"rulership": false,
"exaltation": true,
"triplicity": true,
"score": 7
}
],
"totalScore": 12
}
}Parameters
| name | type | Required | |
|---|---|---|---|
| date | string (YYYY-MM-DD) | yes | Birth date. |
| time | string (HH:MM:SS) | yes | Local clock time at birth. |
| timezoneOffset | number (hours) | yes | UTC offset in effect at the birth moment (e.g. 3 for Kyiv summer time). Decimal allowed for half-hour zones. |
| latitude | number | yes | Birth-place latitude, decimal degrees (north positive). |
| longitude | number | yes | Birth-place longitude, decimal degrees (east positive). |
When to use it
Reach for this endpoint whenever an interpretation needs to weigh planetary strength rather than just report placements — traditional and Hellenistic chart readers, horary helpers, electional scoring, or any tool that ranks which planets actually carry a chart. The total score gives you a quick scalar for sorting or thresholding, while the per-planet rows let you explain why: this Venus is exalted and in triplicity, that Mars is in fall and detriment. It pairs naturally with the natal-chart endpoint — take the sign and degree positions from there and pass the same birth data here to layer dignity weighting on top. Because the scheme is rule-based and deterministic, the same input always yields the same scores, which makes it dependable for comparison features that rank one chart against another.
Notes
Scoring follows the Ptolemaic dignity table as carried forward in traditional and medieval Western astrology; triplicity rulership is assigned by chart sect (day or night). Planetary positions come from the Swiss Ephemeris (Astrodienst) WASM engine in the tropical zodiac, so the sign and degree the dignities rest on match the natal endpoints exactly.
Try the Essential Dignities API
Grab a key and make your first call in under a minute.