Questions About Ordering

A chart reading is calculated for a single instant: the moment you were born. So how useful your reading turns out is largely decided the moment you place your order. Here are the questions that come up most often.

What details are needed?

Three details, and only three, are needed to calculate a birth chart. Everything else is extra.

• Your date of birth — day, month and year. From it come the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets in the zodiac.
• Your time of birth — as exactly as you can manage, ideally to the minute. It fixes which point of the zodiac was rising on the eastern horizon at the moment you were born.
• Your place of birth — what actually counts is the longitude and latitude. The name of the place is enough as long as it is unambiguous; with common place names, please add the country as well.

Your name and your job do not go into the calculation: they can help with the reading, but they do not shift the chart by a single degree.

Why the time of birth counts to the minute

The whole zodiac, all 360 degrees, passes the eastern horizon once in the course of a day: about 15 degrees an hour. So two hours of uncertainty shift the ascendant by roughly a whole sign — and with it the twelve houses, which mark out the areas of life in the chart. The Sun, by contrast, travels only about one degree a day; your star sign stays the same even with a rough time.

If you are not sure of the time, the registry office of your place of birth can help: it is written down in the civil register — though only you and your closest relatives can be given a copy. A printout from the register is more reliable than a family memory, which drifts by half an hour over the decades.

If the time cannot be traced at all, the chart can still be calculated — just without an ascendant and without houses. What remains is the positions of the planets relative to one another and how they are spread across the four elements. That is less, but it is not nothing. In that case please say that the time is unknown rather than guessing one: an invented time produces a chart that looks precise and is wrong.

If something in the details has gone wrong

Digits swapped in the date, the hour and the minutes the wrong way round, the wrong one of two towns with the same name — it happens. So check the three details once more before you send them. If something does have to be put right, always give both: the wrong detail and the right one. That is the only way to tell beyond doubt which record is to be replaced.

Swapping out a few sentences is not enough: with the time of birth the ascendant and the houses change — and with them almost everything the reading says about the areas of life. A corrected detail means the chart has to be calculated again from scratch with the new data and the reading written again. The sooner the mistake shows up, the less work that is.

What to watch out for when you order

If a reading is paid for by bank transfer, only the IBAN has been valid in the euro area since August 2014. The old account number plus bank code is no longer processed; within the EU the BIC has not been needed since February 2016. Anyone still using an old form is left wondering why the payment never arrives.

And one point that surprises many people: a reading drawn up specially for you is covered by your statutory right to cancel. When that right ends, and on what conditions, is set out in the cancellation notice you receive with your order. In any case, what counts is always what those documents say — provider, price, delivery and deadlines. This page only explains what matters about the birth data.

What you can expect — and what you cannot

A chart reading describes dispositions, tensions and rhythms: where your energy flows easily, where it dams up, which themes are emphasised in the birth chart. It reads a system of symbols that has been growing since antiquity.

It does not predict events. No chart will give you a date, a name or a sum, and none replaces medical, legal or financial advice; statements about illnesses or life expectancy have no place in a reading. A good reading gives you a description you can work with — what you make of it is still up to you.

If you would first like to see what one of these sounds like: the free horoscopes and the basics under astrology cost nothing.