Fundamentals of Astro*Carto*Graphy®

The Angles

One of the most universally held truths in astrology is that planets are most important in your chart if they are placed at one of the four angles.  In our horizon based perspective of the planets, these angles are:

Ascendant (ASC)

The Eastern horizon, where planets rise

Midheaven (MH)

The point in the sky where planets reach their greatest distance above the horizon

Descendant (DSC)

The Western horizon, where planets set

Imum Coeli or Nadir (IC)

The point where planets reach their greatest distance below the horizon

It is easy to see the importance of the angles dating from antiquity.  They are the most visible attributes of a planet: rising, setting, culminating.  There never has really been much dispute about their importance.  Although there exist many different ways to divide the sky into twelve "houses", they nearly all agree on the four angles which form the cusps of the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 10th houses.

In the era when Jim Lewis was developing Astro*Carto*Graphy, another development occurred which excited the astrological community.  Michel Gauquelin, after years of statistical studies attempting to validate astrology without much success, discovered a significant and repeatable correlation between the planetary placement of birth planets and the profession of successful individuals.  While these studies were hailed as indisputable scientific evidence of the validity of astrology, they actually proved only a few of astrology's tenets.  But a primary finding was that planetary characteristics asserted themselves when the planet was angular in the chart.  This only served to reinforce the importance of angularity in analyzing charts.

The Relocation Effect

For Jim Lewis, the principle of angularity was the key to understanding the effect of relocation. Instead of looking at the entire relocated chart, we only need look at the planets which become angular through relocation.   These are the ones which will become "activated"; these are the ones which are essentially different from their behavior in the birth chart.  Now relocation becomes much more similar to the example of transits that we discussed earlier.  As an individual travels to zones where his birth planets are angular, those planets will affect the operation of the birth chart in much the same way as a transiting planet affects the chart.  Of course, one obvious difference between these two situations is very exciting:  There is nothing you can do to change  the moment or the character of a transit.  But moving to a different location on earth is well within our control, and you can often stay as long as you want!

We have been looking so far at Astro*Carto*Graphy from the point of view of an astrologer.  This was important so that we could fit the technique into a historical context and see how Astro*Carto*Graphy did fit into the philosophical and practical heritage of astrology.  But to the average user of the maps, there is a much simpler way of visualizing the importance of angularity through relocation.  We are much more able to visualize relocation now that we routinely see images of earth from space and can instantly recognize that, while the sun may be shining on parts of the earth, other parts are dark.

If you are eating lunch in New York, the sun will be close to overhead (near the Midheaven).  But in London the sun will be low in the West, and in Germany it may be setting.  At the same moment in time, every location on Earth will have a slightly different perspective of the Sun's position.  Now imagine that you are not eating lunch in New York, but being born in Chicago at that same moment.  A traditional chart wheel for Chicago will show the sun in the East, having already risen, but nowhere near overhead yet.  So it doesn't have any particular importance as a result of angularity.  But now consider that all around the world there are places where the Sun was directly overhead (New York among many others) or just setting as in Germany.  These are the angular locations of the Sun for you on the world, and they become significant locations for you when you travel. We can continue the same thought process for not only the Sun, but all the planets.  Whenever you travel to a place where one of your birth planets was angular, that planet receives particular attention and its operation will be more pronounced in your chart.

The next step, of course, is to draw all of these angular locations on a map so we can see at once where they all are.  The Astro*Carto*Graphy map was born.