Astrology is a hugely complex system, with texts, references, rules and techniques that date back thousands of years. It can take years, even decades, to acquire in-depth knowledge of astrology: I’ve been studying it for nearly two decades and I still consider myself a student. However, once you’ve learned the foundational principles and techniques of astrology – all of which are clearly explained in a simple, step-by-step way in this book – you’ll have more than enough to start testing it right away.
This book will teach you everything you need to know to cast, understand and interpret your birth chart, and those of your friends, family members, lovers, potential lovers and anyone else whose time, date and place of birth you can get your hands on. You’ll learn how to interpret the revealing personal data a birth chart contains and gain invaluable insights into why you do the things you do.
This book is organized into three parts, built around the four pillars of astrology: the planets, the signs of the zodiac, the houses, and the aspects. Once you have a good grasp of these, and how they relate to each other, you’ll have cracked astrology’s secret code.
Part I: This section explains how to cast your own birth chart online; you’ll then refer to it as you read the book and complete some simple exercises. Here you’ll learn about the elements – Fire, Earth, Air and Water – and about the Sun, Moon and planets: the main heavenly bodies most astrologers traditionally study. Understanding these, and locating them in your birth chart, is the first step towards being able to decode your horoscope. A birth chart is divided into sections – 12 houses, 12 cusps (the dividing line between the houses) and 4 angles. You’ll learn all about these in Part I.
Part II: After learning about the planets, signs and houses, we take a look at the degrees and aspects – the connection, or relationships, between planets and other points in the birth chart, which alter the interpretation of the planets and signs involved. Having a basic understanding of degrees and aspects opens you up to real astrology that goes way beyond the Sun sign horoscopes you read in newspapers and magazines, which have their place, but are just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll also learn about the various patterns that the distribution of the planets in a chart can make, and what they mean.
Part III This is where you start to learn how to put all that you’ve learned together. At this point you’ll have identified the planets in your chart, and know which sign and house they are in, but how can you tell what all that means? This section contains what astrologers call a ‘cookbook’ – brief interpretations of what happens when you put a planet in a sign or a planet in a house. And for those of you who would like to go deeper in your studies, I’ve included a brief guide to making predictions.