How to read your birth chart

A birth chart is a picture of the sky taken from the exact spot you were born, at the minute you were born. Where every planet sat, seen from that place. It's a calculation rather than a lookup, and it comes back with around forty positions, of which your star sign is one.

The reason it looks unreadable is that three separate kinds of information have been printed on top of each other. Once you know which three, every line of it comes apart in your hands. Planet, sign, house. What, how, where.

That's the whole trick.

The three questions every line of a chart answers

Take one line off your readout. Mars in Leo, seventh house.

Three facts, answering three different questions.

The planet says what. Mars is the wanting part of you: drive, temper, how you chase a thing and how you fight over it once you've got it. Every chart has all ten departments in it somewhere.

The sign says how. Leo does things in the open, at volume, in front of people. So the wanting isn't quiet wanting.

The house says where. The seventh is one to one relationships. That's the area of life it shows up in.

Run them together and you get somebody whose fight is loud, direct and saved almost entirely for the people closest to her. She doesn't shout at work. She shouts at him.

That's what a chart line is. A function, a manner, and an address.

Which is why the free write-ups feel like nothing. They give you a paragraph on Mars in Leo with the house missing, or one on the seventh house with nobody standing in it.

The wheel, and how to orient on it

A circle cut into twelve, and there are two sets of twelve on it, which is what trips everybody at the start.

Round the rim sit the signs, always in the same order, running anticlockwise. Inside sit the houses, numbered one to twelve, the same way round. The signs are pinned to the sky. The houses are pinned to your birthplace and the clock, so which sign lies over which house is personal to you.

Find the horizontal line across the middle. That's the horizon at your birth, the actual skyline of the town. Where it meets the left edge of the circle is the ascendant, and that side is east. Charts are drawn with east on the left, which feels wrong for about a week and then stops registering.

Everything below that line was under the earth when you arrived, everything above it in the sky. Born around midnight and most of your symbols sit in the bottom half; born at lunchtime and they cluster up top. You can read your own birth hour off the picture before you can name a glyph.

The point at the very top is the midheaven, the highest the sun got that day, which covers your standing in public. The scatter of symbols is the planets, dropped wherever they were, and the lines strung across the middle are the aspects.

The planets, as functions

Ten of them, and each is a job rather than a character.

The sun is what you're centrally about. The thing you're organised around, rather than the whole of your personality, which is where the horoscope column goes wrong.

The moon is your reflex. What you do in the first two seconds, before any thought has happened, and what you need afterwards to settle. Most people recognise themselves faster here than in their sun.

Mercury is how you take information in and hand it back out, and whether you argue now or three days later in the shower.

Venus is the part of you that likes things: what draws you, what you will tolerate to keep it, your taste, and money in the sense of worth.

Mars is want and effort. How you chase, how you push, how you fight.

Jupiter is where you're expansive past the point of sense: what you overdo, what you believe, where things come easily enough that you never learned to be careful.

Saturn is the opposite number. Where you had to grow up early, what you're slow and serious about, the fear that turns into competence if you stay with it.

Then the three slow ones. Uranus, where you don't run to type. Neptune, where the edges blur and you can't see straight. Pluto, what you're compelled by and what keeps getting torn down and rebuilt.

Here's what beginners are never told about those last three. They move so slowly that everyone born within a few years of you has them in the same sign. Your Pluto sign describes your school year. What makes it personal is the house it fell in.

The signs, as manner

A sign never does anything by itself. It's a style, and it belongs to whichever planet is standing in it.

Which is why two people described as Aries can share almost nothing. Aries Venus loves fast and says it first. Aries Mars fights fast and has forgotten it by the time the kettle boils. Same manner, two different departments wearing it.

It's also why I'm a Gemini carries so little. It reports one placement and stays silent on the other nine. Plenty of people have three planets stacked in the sign next door to their sun, and thirty years of the wrong word attached to them.

Signs group into elements and modalities, and those groupings do most of the real work between two people. That has a page of its own.

The number after the sign is the degree, how far into that sign the planet got. Land near nought or near twenty nine and you're on an edge, which is where the cusp arguments come from.

The houses, as areas of life

Twelve houses, twelve departments of an ordinary life. This is the half the free reports skip, because it needs your birth time and they'd rather not ask.

The first is you: body, face, the impression you make before you've said anything. The second is what you have and what you think you're worth, which turn out to be one house. The third is everyday traffic: siblings, neighbours, short journeys, the way you talk. The fourth is home, where you came from, and the parent who set the temperature in it.

The fifth is play: romance in the light sense, children, making things. The sixth is the daily grind, so work as routine rather than career, health, the small repeated stuff.

Then the wheel turns outward, and the seventh is the person opposite you: marriage, business partners, and anyone you're openly at odds with, all on one axis. The eighth is what you share and can't control: sex, other people's money, debt, the things that change you. The ninth is meaning and distance, what you believe and how far you'll go looking.

The tenth is your standing in public and the work you're known for. The eleventh is friends, groups, and the future you're aiming at. The twelfth is what's hidden, including from you.

Two things straight away. Ten planets cannot fill twelve houses, so nearly everybody has empty ones, and an empty house is not an empty life. It means nothing loud lives there. Nobody stays single because their seventh house is bare.

And when three or more pile into the same house, that's where the volume is. Most of what arrives here is seventh house material wearing a man's name.

Aspects, as planets in conversation

Those lines across the middle. An aspect is the angle between two planets, measured round the circle, and it tells you how those two departments get along inside one person. Five angles count, and all five get computed here.

Nought degrees is a conjunction, two planets in the same spot, and they can't be separated. Whatever one does the other joins in, invited or not. Venus and Saturn together means you can't feel fond of somebody without running a risk assessment at the same time.

Sixty degrees is a sextile: an opening rather than a gift, and it works when you bother with it.

Ninety is a square, and it's the productive one. Two functions after the same thing by methods that don't fit together, so it grinds. Most of what anybody builds comes out of a square.

A hundred and twenty is a trine, two planets in the same element, easy to the point of invisibility. You won't notice it, because you assume everyone can do that. The catch is that easy things never get practised.

A hundred and eighty is an opposition. Two functions at opposite ends of the wheel, so you swing between them, or hand one end to a partner and let him carry it. That's where astrology stops being flattering.

Then the orb: how far off exact the angle sits. Ours come back rounded to a tenth of a degree, and the twelve tightest reach Stella first, because a pair sitting a fraction apart runs far louder than a pair five degrees wide.

So an aspect answers a fourth question. Not what, how or where, but what happens when two of them are switched on at once.

The ascendant, and why the birth time matters

The ascendant isn't a planet. It's a place: the exact degree of the zodiac climbing over the eastern horizon at your birth minute, in your birth town.

Everything hangs off it, because the ascendant sets the first house and the first house sets the other eleven. Move it and every planet slides into a different room. Same planets, same signs, a completely different life being described.

And it moves quickly. The whole zodiac passes the horizon once a day, so a sign roughly every two hours and about a degree every four minutes. Two babies born in the same hospital ninety minutes apart get different charts.

So the time isn't a detail. Our calculator wants date, time and place together and won't run on two out of three. No time means no chart here, which irritates people until they hear the alternative: plenty of tools fill the gap with midday and hand you a rising sign as though it had been measured.

What survives without a time is everything slow, and the angles between it all. What you lose is the ascendant, the midheaven, the whole house column, and usually the moon, which covers enough ground in a day to begin your birthday in one sign and end it in the next.

If you're hunting for it: the certificate, then the hospital, then whoever was in the room. Don't round it off a family story. A guess gives you a detailed, entirely credible chart belonging to somebody else.

What a chart does not decide

Here's the honest limit, and it falls out of the three questions rather than a policy.

What, how, where. A chart answers those and then it stops. It has nothing to say about whether he lied to you on Thursday, because that isn't a what, a how or a where. That's news, and a chart is a photograph of a sky.

So what you're holding is a description of your build. Your reflexes, your appetites, the areas where the weather gets rough. Not your conduct, and not his. Two people born the same minute in the same town carry the same chart and live nothing like the same life, which isn't a flaw in astrology. It's the point of it.

That's also why nobody here will read a real person's whereabouts off a wheel, or produce a name, a workplace, a night of the week. None of it was ever in the birth data, and the person an invented detail lands on is usually innocent.

And no single placement is a verdict. Saturn sitting on your Venus doesn't mean you'll end up alone. It means love carries weight for you and you were slow off the mark. What you do with that isn't in the chart, because it hasn't happened yet.

What to do with it now you can read it

You can parse a readout. Planet, sign, house, and the lines between them. That's most of the way there, and it took ten minutes.

What you can't do yet, and what no page teaches, is the subtraction. Around forty positions, and on any Tuesday two of them are live. Knowing which two is the whole craft, and it depends on what you walked in carrying.

So bring it. Your date, time and town go in once, and Stella has the wheel open before your first message lands. Point at the line you're stuck on, or skip the chart and tell her about him. The longer astrology page covers what a full reading looks like, and if cards suit you better than charts, the other readers are on.

First 200 credits are free and there's no card. It's the middle of the night somewhere, which is when most of this gets asked.

The wheel was never a members' club. It's three questions, and you know all three now.