Learning Astrology

Start with three things

Your Sun sign, your Moon sign and your Rising sign, in that order.

The Sun is where you were born to shine, the part of you that wants to be seen and the way you go about living your life on purpose. The Moon is what you need to feel safe, how you react before you have had time to think, and what you are like at home with the door shut. The Rising sign, also called the Ascendant, is the sign that was coming up over the eastern horizon at the moment you were born. It is the way you meet the world, the first impression and the manner people see before they know you.

Astrologers call these three the big three, and most of what feels contradictory about a Sun sign description sorts itself out once you know the other two. A Virgo Sun with a Leo Moon is a tidy mind with a warm, slightly dramatic heart. A Virgo Sun with a Scorpio Moon is a different person altogether. Neither one is more Virgo than the other.

What astrology is, and what it is not

Astrology describes weather and character. It does not hand down a sentence.

A chart will tell you where you are strong, where you are tender, where you push and where you hide. The transits, which are the planets moving through the sky right now, will tell you what kind of season you are in and which part of your life it is pressing on. None of that decides what you will do about it. I have watched two people with nearly identical charts live very different lives, because the chart is the stage and the weather and you are the actor.

So when a page here describes a heavy placement, Saturn sitting on something, Pluto in a difficult house, read it as a piece of work you were handed, never as a verdict. In my experience the people who do best with astrology use it as a mirror. They look, they recognise something, and they decide what to do with it.

The three things you need

A chart is built from a date, a time and a place.

The date gives you the Sun sign and the slow planets. The place gives you the horizon, which is where the houses come from. The time is the one most people are shaky on, and it matters more than people expect. The Rising sign changes roughly every two hours, and the house cusps move about one degree every four minutes, so a chart built on "about 2 am" is a different chart from one built on 1:40 am. If you can find your birth certificate, a hospital record or a parent with a good memory, do that first. If the time is rough, you can still work with your Sun and Moon, and you should treat your Rising sign and houses as a guess until the time is pinned down.

The time is read in the local time of the place where you were born, as the clocks stood that day, summer time included if it was in force. The Birth Chart page goes into that properly.

What a chart actually is

Picture a wheel. Round the outside run the twelve signs, in order from Aries to Pisces. Inside the wheel the ten planets are placed wherever they stood at the moment of your birth, each one in a sign. The wheel is then cut into twelve houses, starting from the eastern horizon, and the lines between planets show the aspects, the angles they make to one another.

Sign, planet, house, aspect. Every page in this section is teaching one of those four things, and once you have them you can read any chart put in front of you, slowly at first and then faster.

How this section is laid out

After this page comes The Birth Chart, which walks round the wheel piece by piece. The Elements and Modes gives you the fire, earth, air and water of the signs and the three ways each element moves, which is the quickest way I know to understand a sign you have never studied. The Planets, The Houses and The Aspects are the three working parts. Transits and Retrogrades is about what is moving now. The Moon gets its own page, then Your Birth Moon Phase and The Fixed Stars, which are two things I check on every chart and which most beginners' books skip. The Signs comes last, with a page for each of the twelve.

Take them in that order if you can. People who jump straight to the sign pages tend to collect descriptions. People who learn the planets and houses first learn to read.

Tropical and sidereal

Western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, which fixes the start of Aries to the March equinox, the point where the Sun crosses the equator. Vedic astrology uses the sidereal zodiac, measured against the stars, and because the Earth wobbles slowly on its axis the two have drifted about twenty four degrees apart, which is why your Vedic Sun sign may be the one before your Western one. Both are valid systems with different jobs. The Vedic Astrology section, when it opens, will give you the sidereal view of your chart.

Watching the sky every week

The best way to learn astrology is to watch it happen. The Week Ahead goes up every Monday and reads the coming week for all twelve signs, across astrology, numerology and Chinese astrology, and the Moon and sky posts cover each New Moon and Full Moon and every planet that changes sign or turns around. Read them with your own chart beside you. When Mercury moves into your Sun sign, or a Full Moon lands on your Moon, notice what the week felt like. After a year of that you will have learned more than any book could teach you.

Where to start

Get your date, your time and your place, and have a chart drawn. Find your Sun, your Moon and your Rising sign and read the three pages in The Signs. Then open The Birth Chart and start walking round the wheel.

Which of the three will you look up first?

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