CrescentHow to read your birth chart, one ring at a time
A chart is four questions stacked on top of each other. Answer them in order and the wheel stops looking like a circuit diagram.
How do I read my birth chart?
You open your chart, see a wheel with a dozen glyphs and lines through the middle, and close it again. The problem is not that it is complicated. Nobody tells you what order to read it in.
There are four questions, and they stack.
- What sign is the planet in? That is the style.
- What house is it in? That is the subject, and it matters more.
- What is it touching? That is which parts of you are wired together.
- Who rules it? That is where the business of the house actually goes.
Why do houses matter more than signs?
A planet in your seventh house is doing its work in your relationships, whatever sign it sits in. The sign only changes the manner.
This is the biggest upgrade from sun-sign reading. If you learn one thing beyond your Sun sign, learn houses.
What is an aspect?
An aspect is the angle between two planets. It tells you which parts of you cannot act independently.
A planet in a tight square to Saturn never gets to move without Saturn having an opinion. A planet with no close aspects operates on its own terms.
Read your own chart instead of an example
It takes a birth date, time and place, and it is free. You get the Western and the Vedic version side by side.
Cast your free birth chartWhat if a house is empty?
Perfectly normal. You have ten bodies and twelve houses, so most charts have four or five empty ones.
An empty house is read through its ruler: find the sign on the cusp, find that sign's planet, and read wherever that planet lives.
Where should I actually start?
Find your Sun, Moon and rising sign, and note which house each one is in. Read only those three.
That is already more than any horoscope column has told you, and it takes about ten minutes.