An Introductory Guide to Birth Chart Analysis
The Signs:
Aries is the individual, the beginning, spring, manifestation, and birth.
Taurus is the stability, comfort, indulgence, and stubborn immovability.
Gemini is the curiosity, expansion, socialization, and intellectualization.
Cancer is the mother-warrior, the home, & tender invulnerability.
Leo is the dramatic leader, playful popularity and an expressive heart.
Virgo is the grounded healer, witchy perfectionist, & improvement.
Libra is collective balance; good where evil is abundant, evil where good is.
Scorpio is the cycle, the transformation, the obsession, and survival.
Sagittarius is the wilderness, freedom, abundance, and wisdom.
Capricorn is the father, the hardship, the ambition, and discipline.
Aquarius is the revolution, collectivism, individuality, and self superiority.
Pisces is the selfless aggregate, the ending, winter, release, and death.
The Planets:
One’s Sun is one’s soul and one’s vitality.
One’s Moon is one’s intuition and one’s feelings.
One’s Ascendant is one’s skin, one’s personality, and one’s instinctual performance.
One’s Mercury is one’s mind and one’s interests.
One’s Mars is one’s will and the things one wants to take (desire).
One’s Venus is one’s heart and the things one wants to give (love).
One’s Saturn is that to which one will be held accountable in this lifetime. One’s Pluto is one’s access to and wielding of power, as well as one’s capacity for transformation.
One’s Neptune is that around which one will overcome confusion, delusion, and fog.
One’s Uranus is the catalyst for and the results of radical change in one’s life.
One’s Jupiter is what grows, accelerates, and is amplified over the course of one’s life.
One’s North Node is what is born in one’s life; the karmic baby (new self) for which one must prepare.
One’s South Node is what dies in one’s life; the karmic ancestor (old self) one must grieve.
One’s Chiron is the wound, usually developed in childhood, that one must heal all on one’s own.
The Houses:
The 1st house is one’s one’s skin, one’s personality, and one’s instinctual performance.
The 2nd house is the resources necessary for your personality and performance to thrive.
The 3rd house is your immediate environment, the people in it, and the things you do there.
The 4th house is your ancestry, your mother, your home, and your relationship to them.
The 5th house is your inner child, your creative self, your sexual self, and the children you birth.
The 6th house is your lifestyle; how you live, how you work, how you rest, and how you heal.
The 7th house is the personality and performance of the most significant partners in your life.
The 8th house is the way you resource relationships & the way you must transform (die) for them.
The 9th house is the philosophy, the spirituality, and the tradition that guides your life.
The 10th house is your descendants (legacy), father, public occupation, and your relationship to them.
The 11th house is the network you build to support your legacy & the money you make as a result of it.
The 12th house is the outcome & meaning of your life filtered through the shadow of your experiences.
The Aspects:
Squares (90 degree angles, 3 signs apart) are dialectical processes. Each placement in a square challenges the other until the expressions of both have changed. Oppositions are balancing acts. The goal is to harmonize the difference between each placement until neither is too extreme.
Conjunctions (0 degree angles, or-controversially-a shared sign/house) are mutations. Like Garnet in Stephen Universe, planets become something completley new when they are combined.
Trines (120 degree angles, 4 signs apart) are flow. Sometimes they make you happy and sometimes they make you lazy. They are the ease and balance already present in your life.
Sextiles (60 degree angles, 2 signs apart) are cheerleaders. Each placement encourages the other.
Quincunxes (150 degree angles, 5 signs apart) are unconscious improvements and deteriorations.
Here’s how I’d apply this to the interpretation of the following birth chart:
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Sun in Pisces in the 7th
Moon in Gemini in the 10th
Jupiter in Virgo in the 1st
Mercury in Aries in the 8th
Venus in Aquarius in the 6th
Mars in Aquarius in the 6th
Saturn in Aquarius in the 6th
Pluto in Scorpio in the 3rd
Neptune in Capricorn in the 5th
Uranus in Capricorn in the 5th
North Node in Capricorn in the 5th
South Node in Cancer in the 11th
Chiron in Leo in the 12th
Sun in Pisces in the 7th:
You are an old soul who is most alive in intimate, 1:1 relationships. You thrive when you are submerged, lovingly and spiritually, in someone else’s performance. You learn the greatest lessons of your life through these loving, spiritual, relationships. You see your own reflection in these relationships. You meet your own shadows there. And, so, you mirror the people to whom you devote yourself. This is not a failure of individuality. This is what your soul has incarnated to do. You are the most spiritually powerful in and for these intimate relationships. Many of these relationships will be with people who have prominent Pisces placements. Your soul desires very little beyond your connection to these people and so most of what drives and attracts you in this life does not contribute to your own vitality and is not a reflection of your true essence. This orientation toward single-focused devotion clashes with the multi-faceted, multi-hyphenate person you are in public; making you more restless in your relationships until your relationships, themselves, become terrain that features more emotional diversity. This emotional diversity is deeply challenging for both yourself and your partners, but leads to profound realization for everyone involved.
Moon in Gemini in the 10th:
You are a very young intuitive. You struggle to discern and distinguish between the many different energies upon which you pick up emotionally and instinctually. You are deeply youthful emotionally and it is work for you to learn to recognize, feel, process, and express your own emotions. You don’t understand the depth of them and you don’t become attached to them. You do not know enough to take them seriously. You don’t know enough to process them in the language in which they surface, so you spend much time creating a language for them and this becomes somewhat of an obsession. This preoccupation was cultivated by your father, who demanded that you speak your feelings accurately, who demanded that you perform an artificial understanding of your own feelings. To perform this understanding, you pick up every medium within reach. Desperately hoping to deepen this understanding, you reach for every experience that might provoke you toward that depth. This preoccupation makes its way to the public eye. Your multi-faceted, albeit confused, emotional expression is what people who only see you from a distance understand about you. And you feel most emotionally secure in the public eye. You feel most emotionally secure when you are seen from that distance. As messy as they are, you need to be seen in the chaotic expansiveness of the emotions you don’t understand. You need to be validated, celebrated, and acknowledged for your intellectualization of the emotions you’ve publicly processed. So, this is what you’ve become known for. This is the part of you your descendants embody and, when they seek you at their altars, it is about this experience they inquire. This orientation clashes with the devoted partner you are; making your public life more partner-focused until you have a partner who stands with you in the spotlight. This power-couple dynamic causes a great deal of challenge that, ultimately, improves your understanding and the expression of your emotional self, which-in turn-improves your career.
Jupiter in Virgo in the 1st House:
Your skin, your personality, your performance in this world are always under construction. You are excessively critical of yourself and of the entire world around you. You find yourself obsessing over perfecting skin care and health routines. You notice when people don’t respond to you in the way you’d hoped and this observation sends you spiraling into a process of self-refinement and an interrogation of their taste. It is at the very core of your personality to be constantly changing, but not in the fun Sagittarius way, not in the spiritual Pisces way, not in the interesting Gemini way. No. Your *entire personality* is improvement. There is no aspect of yourself that you don’t want to improve and you are both rewarded, financially, and exiled, socially, for this. Your more intimate social performance clashes with the emotional confusion with which you present yourself to a broader audience. You appear to have it all together, as is your preference, but you never truly will. This pushes you to release perfection, understanding it to be a lost cause, and to instead aim for growth. You are also pulled away from this obsession with self improvement toward devotion to loved ones and a mirroring of their personality traits, whether it fits your blueprint for perfection or not. You are called to juggle these foci; never abandoning one for the other for too long.
Mercury in Aries in the 8th House:
Your thoughts are housed in a context that concerns itself with the power that is contained in life and new beginnings and the potency of death and transformation. This is the value you bring to your most significant partnerships; teaching your loved ones to see the life and death, the light and shadow in themselves. You think quickly and speak impulsively. You think in extremes (the beginnings and the endings) instead of being able to apply your thoughts to balance (the middle). You are a powerful creator, intellectually. You are a a powerful destabilizer, intellectually. There is a bright-shadowy magic about your ability to manifest and destroy with your ideas and with your words. You find yourself disinterested in the mundane, in the in-between periods of life. You find yourself struggling to focus when you are not at either a beginning or an ending in your life. This extreme mindset clashes with the slow changes you experience in your sexual and creative life. The clashes push you to learn to be a bit more slow, diligent and pleasure focused in your thinking and a bit more urgent in the changes that must manifest in your sacral self.
Mars, Venus, and Saturn in Aquarius in the 6th House:
In sex, love, and friendship, there isn’t any difference between what your heart wants to give and what your will wants to take. As a result, there is an element of crowded passion and confused tension in the unconventional relationships around which your lifestyle is centered. Your libido and affection are most active in the liminal space between confrontation and ease. You love a good enemies to lovers arc and you love fucking your friends. You are meant to be disciplined about your own passions in your every day life. Your lifestyle is a manifestation of the tension between giving and receiving. You don’t want to work hard at anything about which you are not passionate. You won’t spend a single minute on things about which you don’t deeply care. You don’t care how impractical that is. You don’t care how weird it is. Your lifestyle, your life’s labor, and your health are built completely around being exactly who you want to be, doing exactly what you want to do, and doing it with people who you most likely also want to do :P. Some of the most intense hardships and profound karmas in your life are connected to these themes of passion, individuality, and rebellion. Everyday life gets hard for you when your rebellion, passion, and unconventionality know no limits. Everyday life gets equally hard when you ignore your rebellious, passionate, and unconventional nature. Your passionate, eccentric lifestyle clashes with the power of transformation with which you engage your peers. Your life becomes a little more about organizing, about demanding, about empowerment. Your relationship to your peers becomes a bit more centered around your eccentric lifestyle.
Pluto in Scorpio in the 3rd House:
You transform when your life is threatened. You are powerful when you engage in and expose those things that society does not wish to see or discuss. And this is what you seek to do in your local environment. This is the basis upon which you relate to the people in your local space. Among your peers, everything is about power. Everything is political. Everything is sexual. Your orientation toward power in local spaces makes it so that you almost trip into your lifelong habit of organizing those you can nurture toward a political home. Your orientation toward transformation makes you lazy and less than intentional in the way that you mirror your loved ones and significant partners in this lifetime. You become them without a second thought. You destabilize them without meaning to.
Neptune, Uranus, and North Node in Capricorn in the 5th House:
You are deeply confused about how to express yourself in an uninhibited way. You experience many illusions, delusions, and fantasies about this expression. You work hard to manifest these fantasies; sometimes confusing your labor for the fantasies themselves. You struggle to see that your highest self is one who masters this expression; seeking purpose in and being magnetized toward versions of yourself that offer the illusion of self expression, but actually pile atop your sacral chakra like cement and bricks. Your inner child and sexual self fight to shine through. They find space to do so when you work hard to build structures that might support them against all odds. Dramatic change in your ability to express yourself in this way take a great deal of time to manifest, but often push you toward building these structures, toward being disciplined and ambitious enough to authentically create.
South Node in Cancer in the 11th House:
You fall into situations in which you are called to mother networks, called to nurture bases, and called to collect coin for doing so. This habitual stumbling is karmic and a pattern you must overcome to embody your highest self. This dynamic will make its way into your life, whether you reach for it or not, so it is not something on which you are meant to focus in this lifetime.
Chiron in Leo in the 12th House:
Learning to authentically shine, to play, and to lead with love before this life is done is contingent upon your capacity to face the parts of you that you’ve suppressed as a result of the controlling and critical environment in which you were raised. The people who hate you feel this way because they, too, are struggling to authentically shine. The nightmares that catch up to you are themed according to your worst fears of rejection and insignificance.
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Thoughts, feelings, critiques, and questions welcome! Email me at njerakeith@fourhundredandone.com for readings.
