How to Study Astrology
From the twelve signs to houses and aspects
If you want to go beyond sun-sign horoscopes there is an order to follow. Understand the twelve signs through element and modality first, then planets and houses, and finally the angles between them. Keep to this order and the unfamiliar terms stick far faster. If you know your birth time you can follow all three stages; if you do not, stages one and two still read perfectly well.
Stage 1 · Understand the twelve signs
Rather than memorizing twelve signs one by one, group them by element (fire, earth, air, water) and modality (cardinal, fixed, mutable) and the characters sort themselves out. These two axes are the skeleton of the whole system.
- 1. The Complete Guide to the Twelve Zodiac Signs — The Four Elements and Personality — The origin of the twelve signs of the zodiac, from Aries to Pisces, and how to read personality through the four elements — Fire, Earth, Air, Water — and the three qualities of cardinal, fixed, and mutable.
- 2. The Four Elements of the Zodiac — Personalities of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water — Grouping the twelve zodiac signs into fire, earth, air, and water reveals the broad grain of personality. Here are the temperaments and affinities each element carries.
- 3. The Eastern Five Elements and the Western Four Elements — Where Two Worldviews Meet — Placing side by side the Eastern Five Elements, which saw the energies composing the world as five, and the Western four elements, which saw them as four — a look at their likenesses and differences.
- 4. The Three Modalities — The Grain of Cardinal, Fixed, and Mutable — Beyond the elements that group the signs by fours, there is another axis that groups them by threes. Here is the grain of the initiating cardinal signs, the sustaining fixed signs, and the shifting mutable signs.
Stage 2 · Look at planets and houses
If the sign is the "how", the planet is the "what" and the house is the "where". Only when all three come together can you read someone's chart.
- 5. The Planets of Astrology — the Ten Stars That Rule the Zodiac Signs — From the Sun, Moon, and Mercury to Pluto, what each planet symbolizes and how the ruling planets relate to the twelve zodiac signs they govern.
- 6. The Twelve Houses of Astrology — The Twelve Stages of a Life — From the self to the unconscious, the houses divide a birth chart into twelve rooms and show in which area of life the energy of the stars unfolds.
- 7. Astrological Aspects — The Angles Planets Exchange — From the conjunction to the opposition, here are the basics of aspects — why the angle two planets form reads as harmonious or as tense.
Stage 3 · Read the cycles
Last comes timing. Knowing recurring cycles such as the phases of the moon and Mercury retrograde lets you judge for yourself when to begin something and when to review it.
- 8. Moon Phases — What Did the Moon Look Like on the Day You Were Born — From the new moon to the full moon, here is how the moon's waxing and waning phases mirror emotion and rhythm in astrology — and how to read the moon on the day of your birth.
- 9. Mercury Retrograde — The Meaning of a Planet Turning Backward — Why does Mercury retrograde warn us to mind our communication and contracts? Here is what a planet's apparent retrograde motion is and how astrology reads it.
By the end of this path you can move past a single sun-sign line and see which house a planet sits in and what angle it holds to the others. Houses are the usual sticking point — they are fixed by the hour and place of birth, so without a birth time this stage has to be skipped. Nor do you need all ten aspects at the start: 0, 90, 120 and 180 degrees carry most of what a chart has to say.
When you can change the order
If you do not know your birth time, skip the houses in stage two and read only the planets and the aspects. The houses shift wholesale with the hour, so guessing at them will quietly pull the rest of your reading out of shape. The elements and modalities in stage one already sort the twelve signs into something manageable on their own, so stopping there for a while and coming back later is a perfectly reasonable way to use this path.
What people usually get wrong
The largest misunderstanding is that the sun sign settles your character. In astrology the moon sign is held to govern the emotional life and the rising sign the face you show the world, which leaves the sun as one piece among several. Treating the gap between the calendar dates and the actual sky as an error is another. Precession has shifted them by close to a sign over two thousand years, and Western astrology has always been built on the seasons rather than the constellations.
What this path does not cover
Drawing up a birth chart yourself, and laying two charts over each other as synastry, are not covered here. There are also several ways of dividing the houses, and this path does not go far into the differences between them. In the same way, compatibility judged from sun signs alone is one slice of a relationship. Please do not use what you read here to choose people or to decide what a relationship is worth.