✦ Astrology · Techniques
How the chart is read.
The signs, planets, and houses are the vocabulary. These are the methods — the ways an astrologer turns a fixed birth chart into a living story: the angles planets make, the sky as it moves overhead, the moments a planet doubles back or comes home, the Moon’s monthly breath, and two charts read against each other. The same craft in both traditions — Western (tropical) and Vedic (sidereal) — noted where they part ways.
AspectsThe angles between planets — conjunction, sextile, square, trine, opposition. The grammar of how they talk.TransitsThe moving sky against the fixed birth chart — how today's planets wake the ones you were born with.RetrogradesApparent backward motion, minus the tabloid panic — the sky's invitation to review, revise, and redo.ReturnsWhen a planet comes home to its birthplace — the Solar Return each year, the Saturn Return once a generation.LunationsThe New and Full Moon cycle as a clock — the waxing and waning arc, and eclipses as lunations amplified.EclipsesA New or Full Moon at the lunar nodes — a lunation amplified. Solar and lunar, eclipse seasons, and the saros.IngressesThe moment a planet crosses from one sign into the next — the Sun's cardinal ingress opens a season.SynastryTwo charts laid over each other — the inter-aspects that make a relationship click, or grind.
Technique needs its vocabulary. Start with the forces the methods move around — the planets and points.The Planets & Points