#aspects in astrology
Hi all, it’s been a while! Two years, actually, since I’ve posted anything. I’ll spare you the details of why my relationship with astrology changed (perhaps another post sometime) but since I’m no longer going to be doing anything professionally with astrology, I figured I’d pass along my best tricks to y’all. You can skip to the end if you’d like to see my hand little cheat sheet rather than read all my explanations if you like.
Here we go.
Take this scenario:
You start off by reading about your sun sign. So far, things seem pretty accurate. This astrology stuff seems pretty cool, so you dig a little deeper and perhaps discover your rising sign or moon sign. You look up as much info about your sun, moon, and rising as you can find. Perhaps there are pre-made interpretations for having a certain sun and moon together, perhaps even with your rising sign. So far, it seems like all your astrological questions can be answered by a google search.
As you get deeper, however, you start seeing things like your house placements and other planetary influences. You are likely able to find what all these influences mean individually, but suddenly, there aren’t any interpretations for having your Moon in the 4th House in Cancer squaring your Sun in the 7th House in Libra while your Pluto in the 5th house in Leo forms a semisextile to your Uranus in the 6th House in Virgo.
Howdo astrologers add all these things up? And how did they make those interpretations you found on the web, anyways?
Astrology has a very definite grammar that’s relatively easy to learn once you know what it is. Most astrologers learn this sort of intuitively over time, but I’ll break it down for you.
PLANETS act as our VERBS. Planets are WHAT ACTION we are doing.
SIGNS act as our ADVERBS. They tell us HOW we do what we do.
Say you have a Sun in Aries. To be honest, that really doesn’t tell an astrologer much. All you have is a verb and an adverb. We know that in something that you do, you’re a pioneer of some sort and have found a niche. But without the rest of the parts of the sentence, it’s just a fragment. That brings us to…
HOUSES act as our NOUNS. They tell us WHAT PART of us is doing the action. Note, houses also include our rising sign. More on this later.
Someone with a Sun in Aries will exhibit ONE PART of them where they are very determined. The House determines which part. A Sun in Aries in the 10th House is likely to have original entrepreneurial ideas and be a real type A personality, while someone with a Sun in Aries in the 4th House is more likely to be a mama-bear type.
But how does this interact with the rest of the chart? Those two examples I just gave, despite having 3 layers to the interpretation, are still watered-down, cookie-cutter descriptions at best. To know what state our Noun, Verb, and Adverb, are in, we need…
ASPECTSact as our ADJECTIVES. There’s a sort of mathy reason for this, as things can only be described by their relative placement to each other, but all you really need to know is that aspects tell you whether two NOUNS interact in ways that support each other or not.
Once you get a feel for how each sign operates, what each planet does, what each house is, and how each aspect interacts, you can read a chart with combinations you’ve never seen and make your OWN interpretations of what they mean.
In short…
Planets = Verbs
Signs = Adverbs
Houses = Nouns
Aspects = Adjectives
Happy reading :)
-Ralph
