Do It Yourself Astrology
Everyone’s always curious about thier astrology chart, but the problem is, astrology is a pain in the ass. The symbols are weird and ooky, it’s like an insane dial in an alien language… You have to read a whole big heap of books to figure it out. That’s what I did. It took me twenty years of study to begin to interpret astrology charts, and I am still figuring it out. That’s what I love about it! Each chart is a puzzle, because each person is a puzzle. So interesting….
I think astrology is a useful life tool that should belong to everyone. Astrology is affirming. Once you explore your chart, and start learning about all the different planets, and what they do, you think, of course, I am the way I am becuase I am the way I am. There’s no need to try and be other than you are. Astrology, in my experience, makes people feel good, they ease into themselves, are more comfortable in thier own skin, because astrology is affrimative. If you’re a Mars in Aries, you’re bold, impulsive, reckless, dashing. If you’re a Mars in Pisces your moody, dreamy, graceful, aware and remote. Astrology helps us go with the flow of our own personalities, and life is so much easier that way.
I find that our American culture gives us so many mixed messages. Be good, be bad, be sucessful, be authetic, be an individual, be co-operative. So many messages are baited, it’s not really about us, we’re just being herded along into a lifestyle for some uncertain purpose. It is so easy to be confused, and uncertain. Astrology is the one thing I have found that gives me a basis, a start point for self-exploration.
The problem is, astrology is either way to unwieldily and complicated, or much too expensive. Sure, there are cheap computer generated reports, but they don’t create an in depth picture. Maybe you don’t feel like taking 20 years out of your busy schedule to sit around reading astrology books. I had to go live on a fishing boat in Alaska during the winter to get my study time in, I am dedicated to this shit.
But what you can do is just make your astrology chart into a long term project, that you slowly build up over time. You can create your own astrology binder to collect and keep information about your inner Self.
You can turn your astrology chart into a long term project just for you. Astrology can be a great hobby.
I think it’s really positive to know about your chart. It’s a great way to learn more about yourself, and you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. There’s lots of sources to gather information from, and get a full picture without having to go to any one authority. Learn your strengths and weaknesses, and find the worse and best times in your life.
A great way to enjoy it is to start your own astrology binder or book. Like a photo album, scrapbook or journal, an astrology binder can be a great life project that you build up over time. Instead of being about your outer life, it can be about the journey of your psyche.
You could have an astrology party, where you can launch your astrology binder with collages and notes from astrology books. I would totally do that if I were a pack of teenage girls. You could even make it into a ceremony, with spells and craziness!
That’s totally how I learned to read tarot cards, practicing with my two best friends at her house after school let out…
Your Astrology Binder
I find my interest level in astrology waxes and wanes. Sometimes I’m not interested in all that. Sometimes I’m having fun in the summer and I’m just busy playing. Other times my personality seems kind of flat, and I just want to veg and not be interested in anything. Time to stare out the window.
Then there’s times when we feel more soulful, and thoughtful, and reflective. When you’re feeling depressed or stuck and want to get down to the roots of your life. Or maybe you’ve been bad, and now you’re filled with regrets. That’s okay too. But seriously, what is the matter with you? What’s the matter with me? Sometimes I feel like I got into astrology defensively. Just trying to figure out why I’m so wack sometimes.
In any case, it can be nice, when we’re feeling introspective, to be able to do something constructive with those feelings. Then you can pull out your astrology binder and maybe use it to see where you’re at. Find your patterns, go deeper in. Winter time, especially is a time when we have more down time. Whenever you need it is a great time to have these long-term projects to revisit.
When I feel that way, those darker moods that can lead to burst of interest or inspiration, I can move forward doing something positive that’s totally in my own hands. Interest sparks inspiration and can lead to flow and pleasure. Keeping my research and efforts over time is a great way to save that inspired energy and build up my project.
Some of my friends don’t enjoy reading as much as I do. And some of us struggle with ADHD, or are neurodivergent in other ways. Astrology is a lot of reading. That’s another reason why I think having an astrology binder could help people get more astrology in their lives. It gives you that time to collect and absorb that information. You can learn at your own pace, and build up your understanding as you go along. If you find something more complex, you can take some notes and come back it later. I find, with my reading, there’s times I’m in the mood to read something more difficult and challenging.
You can use the binder to collect other magical information as well. You could also use it for dream work. I find that my dreams come and go. Sometimes I remember them every morning, other times I don’t think about them much. But almost everyone has a crazy dream once in awhile. It seems like at least once a year, you have a more vivid, intense and memorable dream. When you have one of these profound dreams, it might be nice to write that one down. Date it and capture as much detail as you can, and keep it in the binder for later. I find that dreams, notoriously difficult to translate, start to make a bit more sense if you come back to them later.
I like to source my binder from thrift stores and get some huge old badass one with a nice big cardboard cover. Irregardless, they are everywhere and not super expensive. I love office supplies, they make me feel so together. It’s nice to get some of those plastic sheets to put your chart it, helps it last longer. I also get the nerdy little dividers, and make sections for all the different parts of the chart that I want to learn about.
And of course, the best part is, you get to decorate the cover of your binder with cool magic stuff!
What Is In This Magical Binder?
The first thing you will want for your binder is a copy of your chart. Find a website to get your chart and print it out. It’s helpful to print out your own chart and the charts of a few people you’re close to. You learn more if you have some different charts to compare, looking at the charts of people you know well helps you get familiar with how astrology expresses itself in our own behavior.
If you’re really new to astrology, you might want to print out a few keys to help you remember and understand all the symbols in the charts. It’s pretty easy to search for keys for the symbols of the planets and signs. “Astrology cheat sheet” is a good search term. I like to paste them right inside the covers when I make a bound astrology report, that way it’s easy to glance at them while you’re reading. This really helps if you haven’t yet absorbed all the different symbols for the signs, planets and aspects.
Astrology can be so intellectual, with all the reading and charting. But astrology is not a science, it’s more of an art. I used to feel like the charts where just looking at me, and just trying to tell me so much. Over time I’ve absorbed the content connected to the symbols and can get a feel for what’s happening in a chart just looking it over. I had to stop and look at a cheat sheet time and time again in the beginning. But once I got to learn them, the planets took on their individual personalities.
It’s nice to have a cheat sheet that shows the natural wheel. Each section of the astrological pie chart has certain associations that go with it, we call them Houses. There are 12 houses, one for each astrology sign. Once you understand the “personalities” of the signs, you can understand what each house in the chart deals with. It’s a layering of archetypes to create nuance.
The idea of houses is old, it’s based on the “watches”, before the time of clocks when people divided the 24 hour days into rough sections. Each house is assigned a different sign, and therefore gains the ruling planet of that sign. The priorities and beliefs inherent in each sign inform the topic associated with each house. This information will help you learn more about the houses that your planets are in, which can be a huge deal. This “natural” chart always starts with Aries, since Aries begins the year at spring equinox, and it will show the character of each house, and what planets rules what signs.
Find a website to get your chart and print it out. You will need your time of birth to get the best information.
Most people start off with the “mom time”. You know, when you ask your mom what time you were born, and she starts out with, “uhhhhhh.” I have found that if you get mom-time, know that it can be off by as much as an hour. Birth time is a hard time for moms, they’re high on glue, there’s a ring of people around them shouting their name, pain is coming in waves, they don’t know what time it is exactly.
If you have a mom-time, then when you start your research, read around a bit and see what makes the most sense. Your rising sign might actually be the one next to it, or your Sun one house over. Trust your instinct. Astrology should make sense, if not, something’s wrong.
If you don’t have your exact birth time, you can get it by ordering a copy of your birth certificate. Some states already list the birth time information. There’s several ways to pay for the birth certificate on the state websites. I have found that there isn’t usually a space to add requests if you pay online. I would usually choose to print out the form and send it by mail. It doesn’t take much longer, and you can write “please include birth time” on the margins of the form. Make sure that you’re actually on the real state website! People will use this as an opportunity to snatch your info. The states all seem to use an outside entity to do their billing, but your birth chart shouldn’t cost you more than 25-30$, including shipping.
Even if you don’t have a time of birth, you can still learn lots about yourself from your chart.
It’s easy now-a-days to have your birth chart calculated so you can print it out. Astrology has exploded in the last few years, and there are a lot more astrology websites than there used to be, so, that shouldn’t be too hard. I use Astrodienst. It’s a great one. You can save a few charts in there and come back and look at their free daily forecasts and future forecast. I use this website for most of my work and research.
A great tool is free astrology reports. They are fun to read, but also furnish you with instant search terms. These computer generated reports are designed to pick out the most meaningful information in your chart. You can use the headings for search terms. Astrodienst has fun free astrology features. I also like Cafe’ Astrology, you can generate your chart and then look up everything right there in her website. Astro-charts.com has the nice feature of listing all your planetary aspects in order of strength, so you can start looking up the most powerful aspects in your chart right away.
I like to nerd out and put my charts in those plastic covers so they don’t get all wrinkled up.
The Luminaries
So you’ve got your binder all decorated fancy, and your cheat sheets and the astrology charts you want to study in their nice plastic covers. Then what. Then you can get down, down to the nitty gritty.
The two most important things in the astrology chart are the Sun and the Moon. These are the basic divisions of the psyche, we have a day self and a night self. There’s also the Rising Sign. The rising sign is mostly a pain in the ass, but you should know it. Knowing your rising sign lets you understand why people react to you the way you do, because you are coming off like, you’re not even aware… Research your rising sign in self-defense.
The Sun is actually a bit mysterious. It has to do with your identity, but also how you search for that identity. The Sun is what makes us unique, and also holds our long term plans for ourselves. The first thing to do, is to collect information about the sign the Sun is in, and also, what house in your astrology chart your Sun is in.
The Houses are what we call the numbered sections of the chart. Each house holds different categories of life activities. The Sun in a house shows the type of activities we identity ourselves with. Marylin’s Sun is up there in the 10th house. The symbol for the Sun is that circle with the belly button. She identifies with her career, because that’s what the 10th house holds. Her Sun is close to the cusp, or dividing line of the next house, the 11th house, so that might be an influence on her identity as well. The 11th house has to do with the groups we associate ourselves with, and Marilyn was very invested in hanging out with the right people, she was attracted to famous sports personalities, intellectual types like her playwright husband, and famous politicians.
The sign the Sun is in tells you what season of the year you were born, and what portion of that season. This is reflected in the modes of the astrology signs. For example, mutable Gemini is in late spring, early summer, cardinal Cancer is the active coming-to-be of summer, and Leo is the hight of the season.
The house your Sun is in, describes the time of day you were born. People born in the morning and early afternoon will have their Sun in the upper left hand quadrant of the chart. An afternoon or early evening birth will be in houses 9 though 7. Those born after the sunset or before the sunrise will have their Suns position in the lower hemisphere of the chart. You can see that Marlyn Monroe was born late in a June morning, you can almost feel the warm sun on your skin… Her Sun is nearing the top of the chart, because at that time of year, the Sun gets way high up in the sky early in the day. It all adds to the vibe. We are what we are.
Looking at the houses of a chart is part of how we rectify charts. This is the process of correcting an uncertain birth times. If you were working with a word-of-mouth birth time, or only have maybe the time of day, try reading about the houses on either side. Sit with the information for awhile, and wait to see what makes sense.
Do all this for the Moon as well. The Moon is an easy symbol, it’s the crescent. The Moon is an all encompassing symbol, that you can always find new meaning in. The Moon is our emotional body, it’s our subconscious, it’s where dreams come from, it describes how we comfort ourselves, and how we care for things. Collect your Moon sign and try and figure out what house your Moon is in. That house shows your emotional strengths. Marlyn Monroe’s Aquarius Moon is in her seventh house. The seventh house has to do with partnerships and relationship we purposefully join. She was at her best when she was close friends (Aquarius) with her partner, without this, she was not functioning properly.
The Moon is the only body that goes through the entire zodiac in one month, in fact, each month, as it rotates around the Earth, it appears in each quadrant of the sky for a week. The Moon spends about two and a half days in each sign. So then, not only do we have Moon signs, we also have Moon phases. You could be born on the New Moon or Full, or you could have the Moon trine or square your Sun. This information adds some nuance to your Sun sign. I have recommended some good books on Sun and Moon sign combinations at the end of this article.
Your Personal Planets
You see, when we look at astrology charts, we are looking at the psyche as a system with multiple players.
We see ourselves not as a singular consciousness, but as a choir, with each inner personage having different needs, different ways of getting the needs fulfilled, and intensely dynamic relationships with each other. You can call them archetypes, or drives, or sub-personalities… Studying the Luminaries and personal planets allows us to understand how the parts of our psyches express themselves.
The personal planets each represent an important drive in our psyches. They are the rocky, inner planets of the inner solar system, sisters and brothers to our earth. Mercury has to do with our thinking. He is quick and tricky like our minds. The planet Venus in our charts describes our decision making process, she’s very important. And Mars holds our will-power.
Mercury and Venus lie inside Earth’s orbit, and always appear near the Sun in an astrology chart. It’s part of how beautifully our psyches mirror our solar system, and our position in it, as the way we think and make decisions are both closely tied to our identity. I wrote more about the personal planets here.
Planetary Aspects
The planetary aspects are the relationships between planets. When you learned about the signs the planets are in, you learn their motivation, and the house they are in shows their most comfortable area of operation.
Aspects show the relationship between the planets. Can different parts of your psyche, your different drives and processes work together? Or do they struggle to co-operate?Aspects come into being when the planets form mathematical angles to each other. When planets move into angled relationships, they are consider influencing each other, operating together. What type of angle it is, tells you how that relationship is working out.
The Moon’s cycle around our planet is the most familiar aspect cycle, as the Moon enters and leaves aspect relationships with the Sun. New Moon in the conjunction, and the Full Moon is an opposition.
Wow. Look at Marlyn, she has a ton of aspects! They are listed in that stair step chart attached to the box at the bottom of the page. The symbol over the top step, the circle with the dot in it, is the symbol of the Sun. If you go down the column under the Sun symbol, you can see all the aspects that the Sun has made, listed below. If you find an aspect symbol, you can follow the line over and see what planet is making the aspect. It’s very nice. They even add the little number so you can see how strong your aspect is. It’s like gauges, the smaller the number, the stronger the aspect. As the aspect approached the more perfect angle, it gains more and more strength. We can see here that Marlyn has a trine between her impish Gemini Sun and cool Aquarius Moon. It’s a 0*, so it’s a really strong aspect. You would have felt that cool and amused air trine, with it’s drifting light blue sparks. Her untouchable confidence, she’s so herself.
So after you’re learned about your planets, what sign and hopefully even what house they’re in, you can start to learn about what relationships your planets are having with your other planets. This information really adds to the complexity, to draw a more real portrait of a personality. Aspects between the planet can help you learn how your planets operate. They can show deeply held belief’s of all kinds, or strong competing urges. I believe the aspects in our charts, especially where they come together to form larger patterns, are analogous to what psychology calls complexes.
The Nodes of the Moon
One of the most important things you can learn from your astrology chart is about the Nodes of the Moon. The Nodes of the Moon aren’t widely known outside of astrology circles, but I wish they were. The longer I look at these charts, the more I think knowing about your Nodes gives you the most practical directive you can get from astrology.
The Nodes are weird. They are not planets, they are the points in space where the Moon crosses the earth’s elliptic. I know that just sounds weird as hell, but it works, so?
The Nodes come in pairs. They are shaped like little vases with curly edges. You can scroll up and see Marlyn’s North Node in Cancer in the twelfth house. Usually the chart will just show the North Node, and you’re supposed to know that the South Node is directly opposite. When I get a chart from Astrodienst I like to go into the Chart Drawling and Calculations section and choose the “show both nodes” option. I need the visual reference.
The South Node shows where you’ve been. Astrologers take this to mean past life information. The South Node shows where you have completely mastered a way-of-being to the point where it’s old hat. You can no longer grow and develop in that direction.
The North Node shows the direction that you need to go to further your development. This is one place where knowing your time of birth really is beneficial. The Nodes change signs every year and a half, so everyone in your cohort will have the same nodal signs, and other similarities, such as the signs the outer planets are in. If you study the sign your North Node is in , you’ll know what way-of-being is that is your way forward. If you have a Pisces South Node and a Virgo North Node, you need to move away from the mists and daydreams, and work on becoming more practical, organized and interested in the details.
If you know the house that your Nodes are in, you can figure out what areas of life you are overly competent in, and move towards the topics that you need to acquire experience in.
This doesn’t seem to be gentle, kindly advice either. It seems the powers of be will give you quite alot of trouble if you aren’t co-operating with your own growth. This seems to be especially true after the first Saturn Return, in a person’s late twenties, early thirties.
You can gather more information about the Nodes by looking at the ruling planet of that Node, and seeing what’s that is doing in the chart. I will give an example with Ms. Monroe’s chart.
Her North Node is in Cancer, and her South Node is in Capricorn. This means in her past, she was too responsible, hardworking, and possibly too worried about being high-status and elite. The plan was for her to be more involved with family, intimacy, and erecting and protecting boundaries to contain safety. The fact that she refused to do this, accounts for some of her suffering.
Her nodes are in the twelfth and sixth house. The sixth house reads as tasks and busy work, which works well with Capricorn South Node. She was all super busy with her business, in a past life. The twelfth house is harder to define. It could mean she would have had her best life immersed in family, or working to create a family atmosphere in an institution such as an orphanage.
The Universe will not let us remain in the past, evolve, or be destroyed.
Then we can follow the rulers of the signs, and get a little bit more information. The South Node in Capricorn is ruled by the planet Saturn. I see Saturn down there in the 4th house in Scorpio. This suggests maybe she was all uptight about status and seeming proper because there was some horrible embarrassing secret about her family, that drove her. The Moon is the ruler of North Node in Cancer. The Moon in her chart is in Aquarius in the seventh house. This means the way for her to “do” her North Node in Cancer in the 12th house would be to treat her partners with perfect equality, and fairness.
I think you can gauge your success in heading towards your North Node by your South Node. If you do your North Node, you can still have your South Node things. If you only go in the direction your totally comfortable with and won’t deviate from your South Node, you end up with nothing at all. If you get a chance, check out your Nodes of the Moon.
Learning your chart, truly understanding it, takes time. That’s why I think it makes a great long term project. Once you learn information about a planet in your chart, it takes awhile for it to sink and for you to see yourself being that planet. Let’s say you have, let’s make an obvious one, let’s say you have Mars in Aries prominent in your chart. After reading about Mars in Aries, you might be all, har, har, yeah, I’ve got a temper. But then after thinking it over for awhile, you might start to see how fast your temper is, notice how easily you get offended, or how soon you become restless in situations that require stillness and sustained quiet attention. Once you start to see the dynamic of the archetype radiating throughout your behavior, you start to see that archetype in it’s whole action.
There’s more subtle connections to me made.
More complex dynamics take even longer to “see”. The relationships between the planets, we call them aspects, should describe our most powerful emotional dynamics. Let’s say we have Saturn in the 5th house opposite Venus in the 11th house. It can take awhile to learn how you are going to react to having that dynamic in your chart. Saturn in the 5th house would make you feel awkward and stiff around fun, just not good at relaxing into the play with others. But Venus in the 11th would still want to relate to groups, and really want to care for people. That’s a tension you will always have in your personality. Other aspects to the planets in this opposition will shows way that you’ve developed to adapt to and relieve those tensions. It takes time to figure it out, it takes time to see it. We behave so automatically we don’t see how patterned our behavior is.
So once you get your binder all set up, you’re ready to start filling it up with all the information about your own astrology chart, and the charts of your friends and family.
I’m sure all this would be easier to do on a computer. That’s fine. I just feel like when you want to go deeply in to learn about yourself, you have to partner with your inner child. We often forget about the other parts of ourselves, thinking our waking ego is the man, and the only man. But it’s not true. It’s hard to get far in the other worlds, the worlds of magic, the dream world and self-exploration, without the cooperation of the inner child. Children like tangible, beautiful, magical looking things, like your binder is going to be when you’re done with it. Just sayin’. Do what you will. I’m sure there’s people who are so symbiotic with their electronics that their computers are their beautiful magic portals.
The internet explodes with astrological information. When you find something you like, print it out and add it to your binder. If you’re watching a video, take a few notes to remember what seemed to make the most sense for you. And of course the thousands of astrology books to take you deeper.
I have noticed that astrology is very intuitive for people. None of the people I do charts, or read cards for, have any trouble recognizing what is true to them, and what isn’t. The information should ring true for you. If it doesn’t then something is off and the information is not right. Maybe you don’t have the proper birth time, maybe the astrology information isn’t right. You’ll know when you have the right stuff. When you do find the right stuff, grab it so it doesn’t melt away.
The thing that troubled me the most when I began to teach myself astrology, is there is just so much information. I did not know how to prioritize it, or organize it, and it just looked like a pie chart got all out of hand. But it was almost like I could feel the chart staring back at me, trying to say so much. After years of reading and experimenting with interpreting charts, I finally found a method to organize this wondrous load of info so that I could come to a synthesis of the chart. This is the trickiest part of astrology.
I think of it as story theory. I believe in past lives, and I believe that our souls are each unique, and become so more and more over time. I think of souls as like those naturally occurring bonsai trees that grow high up on the stoney mountain. They are shaped by the weather over the years, their limbs in the perfect relationship to their environment, scars magnified into beauty over time. Because the chart shows a picture of where our story is right now, we should be able to make a story about ourselves out of our chart. A story with a beginning, middle and an end. The end is the goal and also the direction you go. This is synthesizing a chart, and the ultimate goal in understanding a chart. Once you have that understanding, you can move towards your own personal wholeness.
Books!
If you get interested in astrology, you could add a small collection of astrology books to your library. Here are some great introductory and fun books. Astrology for Lovers is the introduction that I read that made me understand all the signs, and how they work. Liz Greene, all her books are amazing, I’ve learned so much from this woman.
The next three books are the type that are fun to pull out when you have a group of friends hanging around, quick little reads about Sun and Moon sign combinations, Darkside Zodiac is hilarious. Aspects in Astrology is a deeper dive into all the possible aspects, considered a “cookbook” you can flip through and look up individual aspects you might have in your chart. Illuminating book. Astrology for the Soul is a classic about the all important Nodes of the Moon.
If you’re interested in learning more about astrology, here‘s a list of great astrolgy books.
Astrology For Lovers Liz Greene
Moon Phase Astrology: The Lunar Key to Your Destiny Raven Kaldera
Heaven Knows What Grant Lewi
Darkside Zodiac Stella Hyde
Aspects In Astrology Sue Tompkins
Astrology For The Soul Jan Spiller
