About me, where I’m coming from, the underlying context and tone for this post

I am a cis white woman in my mid-30s. I grew up in a community where the overwhelming majority of people descended from European Catholic immigrants who migrated to the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Our ancestors worked in and around coal mines in the mountains and valleys of southwestern Pennsylvania until all the coal was mined.

I am no longer Catholic; I “lost my faith” around 20 years ago when I was 15-16 years old. I don’t follow any organized religion and I don’t feel connected to any god or being greater than myself. I don’t deny that forces greater than myself could exist, but I don’t feel connected to them.

I don’t truly, honestly believe that the position of stars and other celestial bodies at the time of a human’s birth determines their personality or direction in life. But I’ve always found astrology and horoscopes intriguing. It does usually feel like they are written generally enough that any person could feel connected to any sign’s description or horoscope if they think about it long enough and interpret it the right way.

However, I learned about astrological birth charts / natal charts a few years ago and wanted to know more. Before hearing about birth charts, I really only knew about the sign determined by your birthday (your Sun sign), and some of the stereotypes associated with some of the signs. I had a birth chart generated for myself and I had a deep curiosity about how to interpret it. Not because I believed the standard astrological interpretations present some underlying truth about me as a person or my place in the universe that cannot be arrived at in any other way, but because I have been longing for any kind of structure or goal for my life.

I believe astrology has whatever meaning or interpretation you imbue it with. In learning how to loosely interpret my birth chart according to the standard “rules,” I could possibly inspire myself to make observations about my own life, choices, goals, interests, etc. These observations or directions are not coming from the stars, but from the process of isolating certain areas of my life and examining them through lenses I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen myself. I don’t necessarily think I’m uncovering any deeper meaning or truth, I’m just giving myself a desperately needed framework for thinking about my place in the world. My own interpretations will likely change over time, not because astrology is “true” or “false,” but because I am changing over time; my own perspectives and circumstances are changing over time.

TLDR: I am not approaching my astrological birth chart from a place of “This is the Truth” but from a place of curiosity – how can reflecting on different areas of my life through different lenses change how I see their place in my life?

Basic Birth Chart Rundown

A precise astrological birth chart requires you to know exactly where and when you were born. For the where, most online tools will just ask for city, state/province, and country. For the when, you need to know the local time, down to the minute. Then historical records and some geometric calculations determine where each “planet” (most celestial bodies included in the analysis are planets, but some are not, like the sun and moon) and sign (constellation?) was located in the horizon relative to your position at the time of your birth. The horizon is considered as a circle, and it’s broken down into 12 slices in two different ways: the 12 Houses and the 12 Signs.

• The Houses – used to represent areas or domains of your life. The division of houses is not necessarily even. That is, not each house is exactly 30 degrees of your circle (360 degrees in a circle / 12 houses = 30). Some might be larger or smaller. I have no idea how this is calculated. The house borders are shown in black dotted lines in the example below.
  • The first house contains the intersection of the horizontal (left-right) axis, shown in dashed gray in the example below, and the circle. Then the houses are numbered 1 through 12 in a counterclockwise direction around the circle.
• The Signs – there are 12 signs, and their positions relative to your location at the time of birth determine where they are positioned in your birth chart. Again, I’m not really sure how this is calculated, but I think it is always relatively evenly divided – each sign takes up exactly? roughly? 30 degrees of the circle. The signs are shown in the exterior circle in the example below.
  • The sign that is on the cusp* of your first house is called your ascendant sign or rising sign. It is the sign you could have seen in the sky if you looked due east on the horizon at the exact time and location of your birth.
• (*) “sign on the cusp of a house” is the sign whose beginning lies in the house. Just like in high school geometry, movement around the circle is in a counterclockwise direction. Not every birth chart has an exact one-to-one relationship between signs and houses – sometimes a house can be completely contained in one sign, for example.
• The Planets – important celestial bodies in our solar system are collectively referred to as “The Planets” in astrology, even though not all of them are technically planets. Their exact positions in the sky relative to your location at your time of birth is calculated, and then they are mapped at the correct angles in your birth chart. Each planet will fall in a house and a sign. This interaction between House, Sign, and Planet is key to birth chart interpretation.

Reading the basics of a birth chart – example

The example birth chart shown above is based off of my own, although it is not precise, and it only has locations of three planets marked (the three red dots).

• Start with the rising sign. We can see that Libra is on the cusp of the first house for me, the horizontal diameter of the circle runs through the first house and the Libra “slice” on the left side. Any planets that fall in the first house are also super important, but I actually don’t have any planets in my first house.
• Locate your Sun, Moon, and Venus. Most astrologers would say these are the 3 most important planets to analyze in one’s chart.
  • Your Sun sign is what people colloquially refer to as “your sign” and all people born around the same time of year will have their sun in the same sign.
  • Your Moon sign is related to how you process emotions.
  • Your Venus sign tells you about pleasure and love.

I am a rising Libra, because the dotted line that begins my first house is in the segment marked on the outside by Libra.

I have marked the location of the Sun, Moon, and Venus in the example chart above with red dots. The Moon and Venus are both near the top of the circle, in the 9th House under Gemini. The Sun is located in the 7th House under Taurus.

To help organize and process the information in the chart, I created index cards for each House, Sign, and Planet. I arranged them according to where they appear in my real birth chart and took pictures:

Notice that I have some houses containing no planets (1, 5, 7, 10, 11), and some houses containing 3 planets (3, 8, 9). I think the hardest part of my chart to interpret will be whatever is going on in the 3rd House. There are 3 planets there, but they do not fall under the sign on the cusp of the 3rd House (Sagittarius) but are in the later part of the house under Capricorn.

What’s next?

In my own journey, these are probably the next steps for interpreting my own birth chart:

1. Analyze the 1st, 8th, and 9th houses because they are important according to astrological practice as they are related to my rising sign, sun, and moon.
2. Analyze the 6th, 8th, and 10th houses because they are associated with things that are important to me at this time of my life.
   • The 6th House is associated with daily routine as well as mind-body connection. My daily routine has changed recently and I want to think about how I can make it best serve me.
   • The 8th House is associated with death, grief, and things that are below the surface and hidden. I have been grieving a lot the past 3 years after losing 3 pets, in addition to connecting strongly with the collective grief we have all been processing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of our world and society and politics.
   • The 10th House is associated with career, reputation, ambition, and public life. I am in the middle of a career change and I’m not 100% confident about where my next move should take me.

As I said at the beginning of this post, but it bears repeating… I don’t think my birth chart holds the definitive answers to the big questions I have right now about my life: What should my daily routine look like? How can/should I process my grief? What should my next career goal be?

However, I am open to the idea that birth chart analysis suggesting “Have you ever looked at X through the lens of Y?” could open up new insights or lines of thought that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. For example, the sign Cancer rules over my 10th House. Cancer is associated with nurturing, sentimentality, empathy, and caring for family. Cancer is a water sign (sensitive, imaginative, emotional) with a cardinal modality (initiative, leadership). Coming from a place of emotion, sensitivity, and sentimentality is NOT natural for me at all. How could thinking about career through those lenses give me different ideas about a path forward? Maybe it won’t resonate or help at all! But it’s interesting to at least consider.

Resources

[1] Astro.com: “A Brief Introduction to Astrology” series. https://www.astro.com/astrology/in_intro_e.htm

[2] Star Power: A simple guide to astrology for the modern mystic by Vanessa Montgomery. https://astroallstarz.com/star-power/