Birth chart reading

What a chart needs, and why the time matters

A chart needs the day you were born, the hour, and the place. The place counts because the chart is drawn for the sky as seen from that spot, and each degree of longitude shifts local time by four minutes, about 100 km across India. The hour counts most: the rising sign changes every two hours or so as the sky wheels round.

A slip in the birth time moves some parts of a chart far more than others, and the size of the effect can be worked out from the speed of the sky. At Indian latitudes a rising sign lasts about two hours on average.

Some older Indian records follow a clock other than today’s standard time, which is one more reason to ask where a recorded time came from. The page about readings without birth details lists those clocks.

A doubtful birth time: what rectification can and cannot do

Rectification is the attempt to find a birth time when none is known or the one on record is doubtful. The practitioner works backwards from dated events in a life, for example a wedding, a house move or a new job, and looks for a time at which the chart seems to fit them. Many practitioners use it, and the answer depends on the practitioner’s judgement. Careful practitioners working from the same events can still land on different times, and the result is only as sound as the memory and dating behind those events.

Narayani regards a rectified time as an assumption to keep testing as the reading goes on. She says which parts of a reading depend on the time and which do not, and prefers to say a part of the chart cannot be read than to read it from a guess.

Two other routes are open when the time is missing. One is the prashna chart, drawn for the moment a person puts a question to a reader, which the classical texts describe. The other is a reading kept to what the day and place alone can support, which is less than most people expect. Neither is as firm as a recorded time. The page for readings without birth details goes through each in turn.

The lagna: the rising sign that anchors the chart

The lagna is the sign that stood on the eastern horizon where you were born, at the moment you were born. It is taken as the first house, and the other eleven are counted from it, so every other part of the chart is placed in relation to it.

That is why it works as an anchor. The same planet means something different in different houses, and the houses depend on the lagna. Jupiter in the seventh house is read around partnership, and Jupiter in the fourth around home. Two people born in the same city on the same day, a few hours apart, can have almost the same planets in the same signs and still carry different charts, because their lagnas differ.

At Indian latitudes a sign takes between roughly 1.4 and 2.3 hours to rise, which is why the lagna is the part of a chart most exposed to a mistake in the birth time. The Moon sign, called the janma rashi, is read beside it, because the Moon stands for the mind and the Moon’s nakshatra is where the cycle of periods begins. Whole-sign houses, in which a house is one complete sign, are widely used in India, and other ways of dividing the houses exist.

The twelve houses, and what each is about

Twelve houses split a life into areas, counted round the chart starting from the lagna. A planet sitting in a house lends its own themes to that area. The sign on a house has a ruler, the house’s lord, and wherever the lord sits shows where that area is being worked out. Take the right-hand column as a list of themes to think with.

The nine grahas, and what each signifies

Jyotish counts nine grahas. Seven are bodies you can see in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. Rahu and Ketu are different: they are crossing points, the places where the Moon’s orbit cuts through the Sun’s yearly track. They sit opposite each other and move backward through the zodiac, completing a circuit in about 18.6 years. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, all found with telescopes, have no place in classical Jyotish.

A graha is never read alone. Each is read by the sign it occupies, the house it sits in, the planets it is joined to and the period that is running, so the same planet can read as strained in one chart and at ease in another.

The twelve signs, and how a planet is read in one

The zodiac is divided into twelve signs, called rashis, of 30 degrees each. Jyotish measures the signs against the fixed stars, the sidereal zodiac, which trails the season-based tropical zodiac of Western astrology by about 24 degrees. Each sign has a ruler among the grahas, and that ruler is the lord of any house the sign falls on.

A planet in a chart is read in layers. The planet is the theme, the sign is the manner in which the theme is expressed, and the house is the area of life where it shows up. Venus in Libra in the seventh house is a short example. Venus stands for love and partnership. Libra is a sign Venus itself rules, which tradition reads as a comfortable setting. The seventh house is the house of partnership. All three point at the same area.

Then the lord of the house is followed. If the lord of the seventh house sits in the tenth, tradition reads a link between partnership and work, and a conversation can follow that thread by asking how the two areas press on each other. The link is a prompt for a question.

Divisional charts: D1, D9, D10 and the rest

A divisional chart cuts each sign into equal parts and redraws the chart from them, to look more closely at one area of life. They are named with a D and the number of parts.

The classical scheme lists sixteen divisional charts in all, called the shodashavarga. Others include D7, read for children, D16, for vehicles, D24, for education, and D60, for deep-rooted patterns. A reading usually takes D1 with one or two of them, chosen by the question. Because each is cut so fine, they are the first to change when a birth time is a few minutes out.

Yogas: named combinations of planets

A yoga is a named combination in a chart: planets linked by position, by the houses they rule, or by the way they look at one another. The classical texts list a great many, and each has a traditional label and a traditional meaning.

None of these is a promise. The rest of the chart can weaken or strengthen a combination, and traditions disagree about the conditions. The classical texts speak of yogas in strong terms. Narayani reads them as descriptions of a theme that is available to you, and nothing in a reading depends on any one of them. No chart shows that a yoga guarantees wealth or status, or that a ritual is needed to activate one.

How she reads a chart around a question

A chart holds far more than any one question needs. Reading all of it aloud, house by house, would bury the thing you came to ask. So the reading follows an order.

A first reading follows this same order, and it can stay with one concern. Where the chart cannot answer something, she says so instead of stretching it to fit.