✦ 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.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