Astrology
Western Astrology
At the moment you were born the sky had a particular shape. The Sun was in one sign, the Moon in another, and eight more planets were scattered round the wheel, some bunched together and some standing alone. Western astrology is the art of reading that shape.
I have read charts for most of my working life, alongside numerology and tarot, and the chart is the piece I keep coming back to. Numerology tells me the lessons. Tarot tells me what is on the table today. The chart tells me the weather a person was born into and the weather they have been living in since, and once you can read it the rest of a reading has somewhere to stand.
The system I use
Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, which starts the year at the point where the Sun crosses the equator in March. That is the zodiac every page in this section teaches. The Vedic tradition uses the sidereal zodiac, which is measured against the stars themselves and sits about twenty four degrees behind, and that belongs to the Vedic Astrology section when it opens.
I work with ten planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. The Sun and Moon are not planets to an astronomer, and Pluto stopped being one in 2006, but astrology calls all ten planets for convenience and so will I.
For the houses I use Placidus as the primary system and cross check every chart against Whole Sign. When a planet sits close to a house cusp and the two systems disagree, I read both houses and say so. The Houses page explains why. The same rules are built into the calculator I use for every reading, so what you learn here is exactly what I work with.
A chart, not a sign
Most people meet astrology through their Sun sign and stop there. Your Sun sign is one placement out of more than a dozen, and it is quite possible to be a Leo who reads nothing like the Leo in the magazines because the Moon and the Rising sign are pulling another way. The chart is the whole picture, and the meaning lives in how the pieces lean on each other.
How this section is laid out
The pages run in the order I would teach them.
Learning Astrology is the place to begin. The Birth Chart shows you the wheel and what every part of it is for. The Elements and Modes gives you the four elements and three modes that shape every sign before you learn anything else about it.
Then the working parts: The Planets, The Houses and The Aspects. Transits and Retrogrades covers what is moving now and what a planet walking backwards actually means. The Moon has its own page, followed by Your Birth Moon Phase and The Fixed Stars, which most introductions leave out and which I check on every chart.
The Signs sits after that, once you have the rest in hand.
Astrocartography comes last, and it is a small section of its own: your birth chart drawn on a map of the world, with a page on how the lines work and a page for each of the seven planets' lines. It is the piece I reach for when someone is weighing a move or a long trip.
Two sets of pages hang off the section. The Planets gives each of the ten its own page, from The Sun through to Pluto, and each one carries the planet through all twelve signs. The Signs gives each sign its own page from Aries to Pisces.
The daily posts
The Week Ahead goes up every Monday and reads the coming week for all twelve signs across astrology, numerology and Chinese astrology. The Moon and sky posts carry the live sky as it happens: each New Moon and Full Moon, the equinoxes and solstices, the eclipses, and the planets changing sign or turning around. The pages here are the reference. The posts are the weather report.
Where to start
Find out your Sun, Moon and Rising sign, in that order. The Learning Astrology page tells you what you will need to get them. Then read the three sign pages and notice what fits and what does not. You will learn more from your own chart than from anything I could write about anyone else's.
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.
In this section
- Learning Astrology
- The Birth Chart
- The Elements and Modes
- The Planets
- The Houses
- The Aspects
- Transits and Retrogrades
- The Moon
- Your Birth Moon Phase
- The Fixed Stars
- The Signs
- Astrocartography
- The New and Full Moons of 2027
- Why the Moon Looks Upside Down in Australia
- The Southern Cross and the Southern Sky
- Your Rising Sign
- The Saturn Return
- The North Node and South Node
- Chiron, the Wounded Healer
- Your Moon Sign
- Mercury Retrograde in 2027
- Eclipses Seen from Perth
- Star Sign Compatibility
Astrology
The other pages in this set, and where they sit in the Library.
See every page and post in the Contents.
The Members area has songs, Moon pages to print, the Sunday article a day early and a first look at new Library pages.