Combustion and cazimi: a planet close to the Sun

Tradition distinguishes three zones around the Sun, from the tightest to the widest:

• Cazimi (from an Arabic word meaning "in the heart"): the planet is less than 17 minutes of arc from the Sun. Far from being weakened, it is carried by it.
• Combust: within 8°30'. The planet is burnt: its resource exists, but it cannot be drawn on freely.
• Under the beams: within 17°. The planet is diminished without being destroyed.

AstralPro uses these classic thresholds, the same for every planet. Thresholds specific to each planet were tested and set aside: they put Venus under the beams even more often, worsening the problem they claimed to solve.

The engine examines the eight planets from Mercury to Pluto. Including Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, invisible to the naked eye, is an AstralPro choice: tradition, which reasoned in terms of visibility, knew only five planets that could be extinguished. Three exclusions are reasoned:

• The Sun, obviously.
• The Moon: its conjunction with the Sun is the new moon, already read through the natal lunar phase. Stating it a second time would be a repetition.
• The Nodes, Lilith, Chiron and the celestial points: combustion is a light drowned in the Sun's, and a geometric point has no light to lose.

Combustion is read in longitude, along the zodiac, as the classical doctrine writes it. Cazimi asks for more: a planet can be a few minutes from the Sun in longitude while passing several degrees above or below it. Venus, at inferior conjunction, can stray more than 8° from it through its latitude. AstralPro therefore only declares a cazimi if the full angular distance, latitude included, falls under 17', and only when that latitude could be measured. Otherwise, the planet is read as combust: doubt leans towards the more cautious state, never the more spectacular one. It is a rare event: nearly 98% of charts do not even have a candidate.

This is the decision that matters most. Mercury never strays far from the Sun: measured over a century of ephemerides, it is under the beams 56% of the time, Venus about 26%. Writing this third state would mean telling more than one person in two that their Mercury is diminished, which sets no one apart. The report leaves it unspoken. It still remains in the calculation, though: for the traditional planets, it is one of the elements weighed in their inner balance.

The two states kept are recorded in the chapter I data, after the dignity, in the form "combust (distance from the Sun)" or "cazimi (distance from the Sun)". In the prose, the words combust, cazimi, combustion and under the beams are banned. The writing receives directions of meaning (dazzlement, unavailability, absorption for a combustion; fusion, amplification, self-evidence for a cazimi) and reads combustion with the dignity, in a single reading.

A combustion is not added to a planet's portrait as one more line: it changes how the portrait reads. A planet in domicile but combust does not read like a planet in domicile; a planet in detriment and combust does not pile up two difficulties listed one after the other. The report looks for what the two facts say together: a resource that exists but is not available at will, an action that happens without being seen, a part of the planet taken over by the Sun, that is, by your conscious identity.

Cazimi follows the same logic the other way round: a planet in the heart of the Sun is not only strong, it works in concert with it, without having to defend itself. In both cases, nothing enters a score: combustion weighs in no selection of aspects and no rating. And when your chart has neither combustion nor cazimi, which is the most common case, the report does not mention it and does not point out the absence.

In the chart of Camille Morel, AstralPro's example chart (fictional data), only one planet is combust: Pluto, at 25°17' Scorpio, 3°23' from the Sun (21°55' Scorpio), both in house 1. The aspect grid carries the same conjunction, Sun-Pluto, orb 3°23', Applying.

This Pluto is in domicile, it is the ruler of her Ascendant and the first of her dominant planets. Yet the report does not read it as a freely accessible strength: in domicile but combust, it is a resource that is present and whole, acting in the Sun's shadow rather than in the open. One reading, not two facts side by side.

The rest of her sky shows the exclusions at work. Her Moon is 5°15' from the Sun: it is a New Moon, read as a lunar phase, not as a combustion. Mercury (6°37' Scorpio), Venus (6°30' Scorpio) and Mars (3°38' Sagittarius) are under the beams: calculated, never written. Jupiter, at 0°50' Scorpio, is out of the 17° range.