3 Secret Things Your Birth Chart Can Tell You
Source: Unsplash/Michael Dziedzic
I’ve been noticing that most of you that come to the site love to dig into different techniques, so here’s a little something to spark your interest. There’s so much information you can learn about yourself in the natal chart (or birth chart) but it’s like a nut and you have to know how to crack it open. Here are three things that a lot of people don’t realize.
The Natal Chart is Static. Events are Triggered by The Movements of the Planets Throughout Your life
The natal chart is a snapshot of the sky at the time, date, and location of your birth. A good astrologer knows that interpretation begins with the natal chart and judgements about motivation and drive are determined by the 4 questions you should always ask when first looking at a chart.
Events and influences are activated, however, as the planets move through the sky and interact with your natal planets, and they are moving all the time. The most common techniques astrologers use include Progressions, Returns, and Transits, although there are others as well. That is why your birthdate, time, and location are so important in astrology. For example, every year on your birthday, the Sun returns to the exact same position (degree and minute) in the sky as the day you were born. This allows astrologers to create your Solar Return chart for the following year that is then compared to your natal chart. This popular technique shows what houses, planets and aspects become dominant in triggering life events and allows astrologers to make predictions about what you’ll experience over the next 12 months.
Solar Returns deserve a separate post, but briefly, they’re calculated for the location where you spent your birthday, not where you were born, unless it’s the same place. You can see an example of a Solar Return chart within my case study of Britney Spears.
2. Important Relationships In Your Life Are Already Contained in the Natal Chart
Derivations is a method of identifying important people in your life through your birth chart. Parents, lovers, friends, relatives, children, business partners, pets, and bosses are just some of the people you can identify when you know what you’re looking for. I created this post A Brief Tutorial on Derivated Houses with some examples.
3. You Can Figure Out The Day & Time You Were Conceived
If you can get past the ick factor of thinking about your parents having sex, this is pretty fascinating. I first learned about this technique in a book called The Manual of Astrology by Sepharial. My copy is a hardcover version published in 1962 by W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd that I got many years ago and it says “four books in one volume” on the cover. This technique, determining the pre-natal epoch, is specifically in Book III, The Measure of Time, so I’m not sure if the one available on Amazon has the exact same information. It’s a pretty advanced book in general and the author died in 1929, so it’s heavy on step-by-step instructions to delineate by hand using tables and contains excellent predictive information and techniques that I don’t see on other sites often.
Suffice it to say that the technique is complicated because you need to know if the Moon was increasing or decreasing in light and whether it was above or below the horizon at birth to calculate the number of days. It also dives into some pretty deep metaphysical concepts regarding birth and lunar cycles, but the gist is that your Moon sign and degree at birth was the sign of or opposite your Ascendant at conception and vice versa!
For example, if at birth your Ascendant was 12° Taurus and your Moon was 5° Leo, you likely would have been conceived on the day 9(ish) months earlier when the Ascendant was 5° Leo (or Aquarius) and the Moon was at 12° Taurus (or Scorpio). I use a software program that provides best match estimates automatically, but if you know your Moon sign and Ascendant at birth, you can get an estimate by counting backwards 9 months and see when your Moon was at your Ascendant degree and sign and vice versa. Crazy, right?!
These are just a few things that keep me enthralled with astrology. I can’t wait to share more.