What the planets, the signs, the houses and the special points of a birth chart mean — in plain words, with no mysticism and no promise to tell you the future.
These pages explain how a chart is put together. If what you want is your own chart read — your actual planets, and how they show up in your life — that is a personal birth chart reading.
A birth chart is a map of where the planets stood at the moment someone was born, drawn for one exact date, time and place. It does not show events and it names no dates. What it does show are tendencies: how a person reacts under pressure, what they look for in a relationship, what gives them solid ground and what wears them out.
A chart is built from three things, and most of the confusion comes from mixing them up. A planet is the WHAT: which function is at work. A sign is the HOW: the style it works in. A house is the WHERE: the part of life it shows up in. The Sun sign — the one people call their star sign — is one element out of roughly forty.
The guide is grouped by question rather than by tradition. Your placements covers the specific points people look up first — the rising sign, the Moon, Venus, and the three of them together. Chart basics covers what a chart is built from and what it needs in order to be accurate. Relationships covers what is actually compared in two charts, instead of two star signs. Cycles and timing covers the long returns that arrive on schedule. About astrology covers whether to trust it, where it stands with science, and who reads the chart.
The specific points people look up first: rising, Moon, Venus
What a birth chart is built from, and what it needs to be accurate
The long returns that come back on schedule
Whether to trust it, where it stands with science, and who reads the chart
If you are starting from nothing, the order that works is this: what a birth chart is first, because it explains the planet, the sign and the house; then your rising sign, which accounts for the most common complaint people bring to a chart; then the sun, moon and rising together, which is where a chart stops being a list and starts describing a person. After those three the rest of the guide reads without a glossary.
The chart itself costs nothing to calculate, and it is the honest place to begin: the birth chart calculator shows the Sun, the Moon, the ascendant, all ten planets by sign and house, the cusps of the twelve houses and the chart wheel. No account, and the calculation runs in your own browser.
If the exact birth time is unknown, narrow it down first: the birth time finder ranks the possible ascendant signs from a description of character, reactions and appearance, then works out at what hour each of them was actually rising in that city on that day.
It does not predict dated events. An astrological cycle describes the kind of period, not the event inside it.
And it does not pass a guess off as a measurement. Without an exact birth time the ascendant and the houses are not shown at all: a chart calculated for noon puts the ascendant in a different sign in 93 cases out of 100, measured on 1106 real charts with a known birth time.