Astrocartography

Your birth chart is the sky seen from one spot, the place you were born. Astrocartography is the same sky drawn from everywhere at once. It is the chart you already have, laid over the globe, so that you can see which planets would have been on the angles had you been born in Perth, or in Lisbon, or in a town you have never heard of.

The four angles

The Birth Chart page introduces the four angles, and the lines are those angles taken for a walk. The Ascendant line is where a planet was rising. It is about how you come across, your body and presence, how a place meets you when you step off the plane. The Descendant line is where the planet was setting: the people you draw, partners and relationships, what comes to you through others. The Midheaven line is where the planet was directly overhead, and it speaks to career, public life, reputation and what you build in the world. The IC line is where it was directly underfoot: home, roots, family, the private life and the ground you stand on.

Seven planets, four lines each, twenty eight lines. Every place you might live or visit sits near a few of them and far from the rest, and the ones you are near are the ones that matter.

How I use it

I read the lines when someone is weighing a move, a long trip, or a place that has always pulled at them without any good reason they can name. People often arrive with a story of that kind. A city they visited once and still think about. A country where everything went wrong and they could never work out why. Very often the map has something to say about it.

You take your chart with you wherever you go. What a place changes is which parts of it are turned up loud. On a Venus line the Venus in your chart gets the microphone. On a Saturn line it is Saturn, with everything that planet asks of you. So I read the lines against the whole birth chart, and the lines are one layer in a full portrait.

The reading is guidance. A Saturn Midheaven line is a place for serious work and discipline, which suits some seasons of a life beautifully and would be a hard place to retire to. A Jupiter line is generous and can tip into excess. I will tell you how a place is likely to meet you and what it is good for. I will never tell you where to live. That decision belongs to you, and it always did.

The birth time

Astrocartography needs a good birth time more than any other part of the chart. The whole map is worked from the exact moment, and a few minutes out moves every line. The Midheaven lines shift about a degree of longitude for every four minutes, so a time that is half an hour wrong puts the lines several hundred kilometres from where they should be, which on this map is the difference between a city sitting on a line and the line passing it by.

The time is read in the place and the time zone of the birth, with daylight saving checked for that day and that year. If your time is rough, the lines are rough too, and I will say so. The Birth Chart page has more on why the time matters so much.

How these pages are laid out

How the Lines Work takes each of the four angles in turn, explains how the lines are found and how far from a line you need to be for it to count, covers the birth time properly, and shows you how a relocation reading is put together.

The Planetary Lines is the index. Each of the seven planets has its own page under it, Sun Lines through to Saturn Lines, and each page walks the planet's four lines in the same order: Ascendant, Descendant, Midheaven, IC. What the place brings, where the gift is, where the catch is, and what that place is good for.

Where to start

Read How the Lines Work first. Then look at your own birth chart and find the planets closest to the angles, because the lines that run near your birthplace belong to those planets, and your chart already shows them as strong. That is the quickest way to feel what a line is. You have been living on your own lines all your life.

Then read the pages for the planets whose lines run through places you know. See whether the city that always felt like home has a Moon line or a Venus line running through it. In my experience it very often does.

You will be your own teacher. All I will do is help you remember what you already know.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

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