The astrological personality analysis

An astrological personality analysis starts from a single instant: the moment you were born. From the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets at that minute a picture emerges that describes no events, but dispositions – inclinations, tensions, recurring patterns.

What is calculated

Three details are needed: date of birth, place of birth and the time, as close to the minute as possible. From those a drawing of the sky can be made, as it stood over that place at that moment.

That drawing holds four layers, and each one answers a different question:

• The planets – what is at work. Each one stands for a basic force: will, feeling, thought, affection, drive, expansion, limitation.
• The signs – in what manner it works. The same need expresses itself differently in Aries and in Pisces.
• The houses – where it shows. Twelve areas of life, from possessions through partnership to profession.
• The aspects – how the parts work together. These are the angles between the planets; they show whether two forces support or hinder one another.

Why the birth time has to be so exact

The Sun, the Moon and the planets move slowly enough that a quarter of an hour hardly counts. For the ascendant that is not so. It moves on about one degree every four minutes and runs once through the whole zodiac within twenty-four hours.

All the houses shift with it. A birth time that someone has rounded to the half hour can leave planets in a different area of life – and with that a considerable part of what is said falls away. If no reliable time is available, an analysis is still possible; everything that depends on the houses then has to be read with reservations.

Why an analysis contradicts itself

Many people are puzzled when two statements turn up in one text that seem to rule each other out: cautious and reserved in one place, enterprising and free-spending in another.

That is not a fault of the method, it is its result. A chart is made up of many factors that cannot be brought into a single line, and people are made the same way. Someone can count every penny at the supermarket and give friends the last thing they own. Both are in the same picture, because both belong to the same person.

Analyses worth having do not smooth such opposites over, they name them. Usually that is just where the interesting part lies: at the place where two dispositions have to negotiate with each other.

Not every factor weighs the same

A reading that lines up all the details unsorted is of little help to you. What matters is how strong a factor is in the first place: how exact an angle turns out to be, how well a planet sits in its sign, how often the same theme comes up again in different places.

If a trait shows up three or four times independently, it carries weight. If it stands there only once and weakly, it is a note in the margin. Under pressure the stronger of the two generally wins out.

What an analysis can do – and what it cannot

It can give you a language for things you know about yourself but have never named. It can show where a strength and a weakness have the same root. And it can make sense of contradictions you have been rubbing up against for years.

It does not replace medical, legal or financial advice, it does not predict events, and it takes no decision off your hands. A birth chart records possibilities; no one passes judgement on them but you. What you make of it is your own affair.

You can read up on how the individual components work in detail under horoscopes and the ascendant.