‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how we wonder what you are!’ The influence of the planets on our lives has represented a source of fascination for many thousands of years – and never more so than right now. It's estimated that more than seventy million Americans – in search of a little astrological guidance – start each day by reading their Star Sign horoscope.
But the truth is that Sun-Sign forecasts can’t be expected to provide anything more than somewhat generalized astrological predictions. Without your full birth data – comprising date, place, and if possible time of birth which are needed to draw up your birth chart – it just isn’t possible to tell you very much of a detailed nature about your immediate future.
What is a Birth Chart?
In astrology, a birth chart is a circular map of the heavens depicting the arrangement of the planets within the 360° of the Zodiac – a belt of sky flanking the perceived orbit of the Sun as viewed from Earth – at an exact moment in time (i.e. our birth time) and when seen from a particular location on earth (our birth place).
In itself, however, our natal chart is nothing more than a blueprint of our life potential. To trigger it into action, it needs the stimulus of transits – literally the movements of a celestial body (generally one of the ten planets, including the Sun and Moon) over the degree areas of its key features – the energizing influence of which will bring these to manifestation at specific times in our life.
Observations recorded by astrologers over many thousands of years have indicated an uncanny correlation between these cosmic events and the destiny of mankind, with particular emphasis on the geometric angles (or aspects as these are known in astrology) formed between transiting planets and natal planets which – depending upon their nature – will activate our life’s blueprint in a more or less harmonious or more challenging way.
The Importance of Timing
The more precise we’re attempting to be with our astrological predictions, the more important it becomes, of course, to get our mathematics right and to take into account the many variables that can affect the accuracy of our result.
Of these, timing is vital. Although perhaps not such a big issue where slow moving planets like Pluto, Neptune or Uranus are concerned, which can hover over specific degree areas of our birth chart for up to a couple of years, the timing of the transits of rapidly moving inner planets – or of the Moon, for example, which travels approximately 1° every two hours – is of critical significance. Albeit technically considered to be relatively ‘minor’, lunar transits are nevertheless strongly influential in terms of their astrological effects on our day-to-day life.
For this reason, for an astrological forecast to be as correct as possible, in addition to knowing the place where a person was born, it’s also important to know where they are currently living at the time when the prediction is to be made. For example, if you were born in Los Angeles, but now living in London, because of the time difference between these two cities, we need to bear in mind that a transit to your birth chart will now take effect 8 hours later than it would have done if you were still resident in your birth place.
A Question of Priorities
Prioritizing the influence of transits is also essential. With more than one transiting event often hitting our birth chart simultaneously on a particular day, and with some transits inevitably more powerful than others, determining which of these is likely to be the most important constitutes another demanding mathematical task.
Before the days of computerized calculations, getting all of this right required the dedicated services of a professional astrologer – and a correspondingly high fee. Nowadays, however, with the availability of sophisticated astrological software such as that developed by ‘AstroReveal', it’s possible to make personalized daily forecasts accessible to a far wider audience and at a much reduced cost. With all this mind-blowing expertise at your disposal, think twice next time you reach for those newspaper daily horoscopes!
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