Where to Begin

Open a chart and you are looking at roughly two hundred pieces of information. Fourteen bodies, twelve signs, twelve houses, forty-odd aspects, each with a degree and an orb. The beginner's mistake is to start at the top and work down, describing each placement in turn. That produces a list, not a reading — and it is why so much astrological writing sounds like a horoscope stapled to an encyclopedia.

A reading is not a description of every part. It is an argument about what the whole thing is doing. And to make an argument you need an order of operations: a repeatable sequence that finds the load-bearing structure first and lets everything else arrange itself around it.

The Hellenistic astrologers had a strict procedure, and it began where this one does: with the Ascendant and its ruler. Vettius Valens works through charts in a consistent order — the rising sign, the lights, the condition of the ruling planet, then the houses in turn. The tradition did not treat all placements as equal. It ranked them, and it ranked them before interpreting anything.

The modern loss of that procedure is why so much contemporary astrology feels flat. If every placement carries the same weight, no placement carries any. The old astrologers knew what to look at first because they knew what governed what.

The order of operations. Follow it every time until it is habit.

1. The Ascendant and its ruler. Who is this, how do they arrive, and where is the life pointed? Find the rising sign, then find its ruling planet and note what house it occupies. That house is the direction of the life.

2. The Sun and the Moon. The self being built, and the need underneath it. Sign, house, and their relationship to each other.

3. The three or four tightest aspects. Sort the aspect list by orb. Anything under about 1.5° is structural. This is the spine, and it is the subject of the next lesson.

4. The nodal axis — and anything squaring it. Where they came from, where they are going, and what stands in the gate.

5. Saturn. The wound, the withholding, the eventual authority. Sign, house, degree, and its closest hard aspect.

6. Everything else, in descending order of loudness. Angular planets, stelliums, anything at a critical degree, then the rest — briefly, or not at all.

The discipline that matters: by step four you should be able to state, in one sentence, what this chart is about. If you cannot, do not proceed to step five. Go back and look harder. A reading that has no thesis is a list.

Run the six steps on your own chart, in order, writing one line for each. Do not skip ahead to the placements you already find interesting.

Then, before reading anything else, finish this sentence: "This is a chart about ___."

It should be one sentence, and it should be uncomfortable. If it is comfortable, you have written a description rather than a reading.

Run the steps on a chart with Pisces rising at 21°, Sun 12° Gemini, Moon 13° Leo conjunct Mars, Saturn 29° Cancer, North Node 12° Scorpio.

1. Ascendant: Pisces — arrives without edges, permeable, hard to define. Ruler Jupiter in the 3rd: the life is pointed at speech. 2. Lights: Sun in Gemini in the 4th — a self rooted in a home made of words. Moon in Leo in the 6th — a need to be seen, stationed in the house of service. 3. Tightest aspects: Sun opposite Neptune 0.2°. Venus trine Pluto 0.3°. Saturn square Chiron 0.9°. 4. Nodal axis: South Node 12° Taurus in the 3rd with Jupiter on it; North Node 12° Scorpio in the 9th. And the Moon squares both at 1.4° — the apex. 5. Saturn: 29° Cancer, detriment, anaretic, in the 5th.

Now the sentence: This is a chart about someone who is required to say out loud what she went down and survived — and whose need to be seen is the exact thing standing in the way.

That took five steps and no interpretation of anything beyond the loudest structures. Every remaining placement in the chart will now attach itself to that sentence, or be dropped.

• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology — the traditional order of chart delineation.
• Robert Hand, Horoscope Symbols — on ranking the parts of a chart by significance.
• Demetra George, Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice — worked delineations, step by step, in the traditional sequence.