GUIDES
Learn the sky,
then read your family's.
Honest explanations of how birth charts actually work — what is calculated, what is interpretation, and where the line between them sits.
FOUNDATIONS
What a birth chart is
A birth chart — also called a natal chart — is a map of the sky at the exact moment and place a person was born. It records where the Sun, Moon, and planets stood, which sign was rising on the eastern horizon, and how the sky was divided into twelve houses from that spot on Earth.
When the birth time is unknown
Without an exact birth time you can still read most of a chart: the Sun and the outer planets are reliable, and Mercury, Venus, and Mars usually are too. What becomes unreliable is the rising sign, the houses, and sometimes the Moon — the three parts of the chart that depend on the hour.
READING A CHART
How to read a birth chart
To read a birth chart, work from the general to the specific: first the Sun, Moon, and rising sign; then the balance of elements; then each planet by sign and house; then the aspects between planets; and finally whatever the chart repeats loudest. A chart read in that order tells a story instead of a list.
The planets
In a birth chart, each planet describes a different function: a drive, an appetite, or a way of operating. The Sun and Moon are the luminaries, Mercury through Mars move quickly and shape daily personality, and Jupiter outward move slowly enough that their placements are partly generational.
The twelve houses
The twelve houses divide the sky as seen from your exact birthplace at your exact birth time, and each one covers an area of life — self, resources, communication, home, creativity, health, partnership, and so on. Signs describe how a planet behaves; houses describe where it happens.
TWO CHARTS TOGETHER
Synastry and compatibility
Synastry is the comparison of two birth charts. It looks at the angles between one person's planets and the other's, and at which houses each person's planets fall into in the other's chart, to describe how two people tend to affect each other.
Family astrology
Family astrology reads a household as a set of related charts rather than one chart at a time. It looks for signs and placements that repeat across generations, for the contacts between each pair, and for how the same day in the sky lands differently on each person in the same home.
THE SKY IN MOTION
Transits and horoscopes
A transit is a planet's current position touching a placement in your birth chart. Today's sky is identical for everyone, but it lands on a different part of each person's chart, which is why a genuine horoscope has to be built from your own birth details rather than your Sun sign alone.
Equinoxes, solstices, eclipses
Equinoxes, solstices, new and full Moons, and eclipses are the turning points of the year. Each is a precise astronomical event with a calculable moment, and each marks the start of a new phase that astrology reads as a natural point to begin or complete something.
THE TWELVE SIGNS
Every sign, inside a chart
Dates, element, modality and ruling planet for each sign — and what it describes as a Sun, a Moon, a rising sign, or on a house cusp.