What is Astrology?

Welcome to my astrology information page! The purpose of these short posts is to give you a quick primer on what I do and what you can expect from a consultation session with me.

Your birthdate, with location and specific time of birth, provides a highly specific chart – what astrologers call a natal chart – that lays out from a geocentric perspective where the planets, the Moon, and other important astrological points were at the moment of your birth.

For reasons that never cease to mystify me, that layout can tell an astrology a surprising amount about your personality, your psychological make-up, your relationships with parents and loved ones, your past and your future. Evolutionary astrologers (of which I am one) even believe the chart can reveal information about your past lives, wounds you carry over into this life, and your overall soul-purpose in this incarnation.

But that is just the half of it. When we compare your natal chart to where the planets are at any given moment, an astrologer can see a whole host of influences that coincide and play out in your life – things you do, and things that happen to you. These are called “transits” – an astrologer examines the angular relationship between a transiting (i.e. moving) planet to your stationary natal chart. This tells us how the planets are influencing your life at any given moment.

Since different planets or orbs (astrologers refer to the Sun and Moon as “planets”) have different orbital speeds, some planets will affect you for longer and more deeply than others. The Moon, for example, moves very quickly and its effects on your life are fleeting and typically minimal. Pluto, on the other hand, moves very slowly and its impact tends to be deeply transformative and played out over a matter of years. While some astrologers are interested in the transits of Mercury or Venus, I restrict my analysis to the slower moving planets – Jupiter and beyond – because these are the ones that tend to have a noticeable impact in our lives.

You may be wondering why on earth astrology would work, and certainly you will find many who laugh at the very idea that it could. I honestly don’t know why it works, but – in my 20 years of studying and practicing it – I’ve been consistently surprised at how much it does. I plan to flesh out my philosophical ideas about what astrology suggests about the nature of reality on my “Ideas” blog page. But I can tell you that, in my experience, an astrological reading gives me an incredibly accurate and intimate look into a person’s psyche and a map for events, pressures and changes the person is likely to experience in the present and future.

Sample chart

This is Edgar Allan Poe’s natal chart