Learn astrology

A birth chart is built from four things: planets, signs, houses, and the angles between them. Learn them in that order and the rest follows. Everything below is one of those four explained once, properly, with its sources named.

Start here

If you are beginning, read these seven in this order. They give you the frame a chart is built on — what the circle is, which three placements carry the most weight, and how to find them. You will still want the planet, house and aspect pages before you can read a chart end to end, and the last of the seven tells you what order to take them in.

  1. What is a birth chart? — what the circle actually is
  2. Your big three: sun, moon and rising — why your sun sign is a third of the answer
  3. How do I find my rising sign? — and what to do if you don't know your birth time
  4. What do the four elements mean? — the oldest classification in the system
  5. What are cardinal, fixed and mutable signs? — the more useful division, and the one nobody explains
  6. What is a transit? — the difference between your chart and today
  7. How do I read my birth chart? — the whole thing, in order

The planets

Ten bodies, each with a job. The seven visible ones have been read for two thousand years and carry a dense traditional literature; Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered in 1781, 1846 and 1930 and are read differently for that reason, which these pages say plainly rather than glossing over.

Each page covers what the planet governs, its dignities, what it looks like strong and weak, and one honest line about what it does not mean.

The houses

Twelve divisions of the chart, each taking a department of life — the fourth is home, the tenth is career, the seventh is partnership. Where the planets are tells you what is happening; the houses tell you where.

These twelve pages are the densest classical material on the site. Each gives the house's significations with their sources, its natural sign and ruler, what a visiting planet tends to raise, and the misreading people most often make about it.

The aspects

The angles planets make to each other, and the part of astrology that is pure geometry. A square is ninety degrees, a trine is a hundred and twenty, and what those angles are held to mean is interpretation built on top of arithmetic that anybody can check.

Start with what an aspect is and finish with orbs, applying and separating, which is what makes the other five usable.

Practical

The how-to pages, plus two that most astrology sites would not publish: astrology and science, which says plainly that astrology has been tested and has not produced results that hold up, and how we compute our horoscopes, which shows our working including the parts that are automated.

Who writes these

Four bylines, each working in a different tradition, because the traditions disagree about what matters and the disagreement is the point.

These are house voices rather than four separate employees — the way a magazine keeps a consistent style across many hands. Each is a defined method and register that the writing is held to, and the drafting is done by software against computed chart data and then edited. How we compute our horoscopes sets all of that out in full, including what is automated and what is not.

Yusuf Karaca reads in the classical and medieval tradition — dignity, rulership, the condition of a planet rather than its sign alone. He writes the houses and the seven traditional planets.

Ines Vasquez reads in the modern and evolutionary tradition — transits against the natal pattern, recurrence, the nodes as direction rather than fate. She writes the aspects and the outer planets.

Rhys Calloway works with timing: when inside a day something is possible, what a void-of-course Moon means for an afternoon, how to choose a date. He writes the moon phases, retrogrades and election.

Nadia Reyes edits, and writes the practical pages.

What this section will not do

It will not tell you what is going to happen. It will not give you a compatibility score, predict an illness, or advise you about money. Where a claim is astronomical — where a planet is, when an aspect is exact, how fast the Moon moves — it is computed and stated as fact. Where it is interpretation, it is labelled as interpretation and attributed to whoever originated it, so you can see how old an idea is and who thought it up.

That distinction is the whole method here. Astrology and science sets out where we think the evidence actually stands, and why your horoscope is sometimes wrong explains the limits of a reading written for a twelfth of the population.

If you want your own chart rather than the general case, the birth chart calculator will cast it, and the moon sign calculator will find the one placement most people recognise in themselves first.

Everything in this section

Foundations

The planets

The houses

The aspects

Practical