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Everything is born at some point.
My friend Margaret asked if cats can have birth charts. I said, “Yes, everything does.” And then we went ahead and played with her cats and gave her baby Lorne our “pizza bones.”1 But… what’s it really mean for everything to have a birth chart?
To address the technical and (more) simple side of this question: Your cat has a chart and you appear in their chart. You have a chart and your cat appears in your chart. Your cat can be understood somehow in relation to your Sixth House (pets/animals smaller than a cow) or maybe your Fifth House (children, idk, some of y’all are intense), and you can be understood somehow in relation to your cat’s Fourth House (parent, again, for the intense among us) or maybe Sixth House (in addition to pets, this house represents those who have dominion over us, which surely my cat Oliver feels about me sometimes). Since I’m not the fun kind of astrologer who does much with personality in the chart, I can’t say whether your cat being a Leo means she wants you to make her an Instagram account, but we could, say, get an idea of when an important pet might enter your life or when you ought to be extra diligent about that annual vet visit. Obviously, ymmv with these bits of astrological intel, but they’re theoretically sound.
To go a bit deeper and touch on some ideas I’m sure I’ve talked about before: the astrological tradition sees “a moment of birth” as being applicable to just about anything you might be interested in better understanding. This is poetically fertile, obviously. A person and their life can be read in a chart just the same as my pet cat or the city of Baghdad or your marriage or the question, “Will the Phillies disappoint me this year?” There’s a chart that can be drawn up for each of these equally important topics. We can look at the chart of anything that has a beginning which is to say we can look at the chart of anything, any animal, vegetable, mineral, or idea.
The magic of a birth, the beginning of the relationship between that soul and the world around it is easy to see as beautiful. A new center of gravity emerges. We all must shift slightly to make room. It’s easy to conceive of this with a new baby person, to get a smile out of your niece and go, “Oh! Yes, you’re significant. You’re the start of something.” Harder, maybe, to do so for some other animals, or for the initiation of a relationship, or for a question you want to know the answer to (i.e. “Will the Phillies disappoint me this year?”.
It’s sometimes a challenge to know when a beginning occurs. Noticing what you think constitutes a beginning is telling in itself and probably has some bearing on how you would interpret a chart. But the question remains: what’s the start of something? The question is complicated enough that it’s been used by certain persons on the political right as an intentionally fuzzy defense against abortion access. It’s not simple (though I don’t think it’s all that relevant to abortion access) to identify when we’ve started moving irrevocably forward and toward any given outcome. When, really, is the beginning?
First, we might consider what a “root” chart really represents. Yes, it’s the initiation chart, the chart that comes into existence when a baby breathes their first breath, when a marriage starts, or when you first consider a question that you want to answer (blah blah blah… Phillies?). But what’s it represent?
Dorotheus of Sidon said sometime in the first century CE: “the stars … indicate for the people what will affect them from the time of the native’s birth until his separation from the world, if God wills.” A timeline, if you can read it, he says, which is pretty much the orthodox perspective. I’d push on that a bit and ask, “Okay, so it’s a timeline, but why does the timeline start right now? Why not one chart at the beginning of time that explains everything forever?” It only makes sense if we can act as if “the start of something” is also a branching point, a point of departure. Humor me, please; I think astrological charts are questions (assertions), though they’re questions that contain the answers (responses).
A baby born is both the question, “what will this life be?” and the answer, just the same as any relationship you begin contains its best moments and its worst all at once. What I’m trying clunkily to say is that we can think about any given astrological chart, whether it is a natal chart, a horary chart, an election chart, or just a chart you pull up for no reason, as an assertion (a question) that “this is how the world is right now” that challenges the reader to respond with “what then?” (an answer). This is probably why I was so drawn to this tradition, because I love questions.
It’s hard to articulate why there’s any value in this game of astrology, or what stance one has to take for the value to be clear. To help explain, a tangent into one of my favorite books from childhood, the Philip Pullman His Dark Materials series, is useful. In the books we watch the protagonist Lyra intuitively manipulate and work the alethiometer, a fictional tool that looks not unlike a compass with an astrological chart on it. Without any training, by creative intuition, she is able to use it to answer any question that comes to her mind. In the world of the book, this takes most academics a lifetime of study to accomplish with any skill, but Lyra is able to use it from just about the first time she picks up the device. By the end of the series Lyra loses this intuitive gift, learning (along with us) something about innocence and growing up and forgetting how to stay open to possibility.
The same kind of mindset is needed when thinking about astrological charts and all the questions one might ask with them. An impossible balance of being open to the synchronistic while applying rigorous analytical methods. It’s why most astrologers I know aren’t out here planning their daily lives to the nth fraction of a second—it’s just not worth it. Occasionally, for the most important events or in the most bewildering times, we might draw up a chart and try to make sense of things, but it’s something you have to hold with the lightest touch imaginable. Anything you hope to glean can become overwrought quickly, lead in your palm where you thought you’d find gold.
Sure, you can wish for the intuitive or inspired reading, the message that emerges fuzzily and then with clarity from the glyphs and lines on an astrological chart, but you’ll be wishing for a long time. Instead you have to try to maintain that openness while plodding along the methodological path you’ve (hopefully) studied for many boring hours. It reminds me of the way so many spiritual exercises rely on showing up and following the routine. Return to the mat and do the sequence, return to the pillow and count the beads, kneel and recite. Contemplate without expectation.
One of the primary gifts of good astrology is humility. It seems counterintuitive when you look at the way astrology has gotten out of hand in the mainstream. The vast majority of astrological “content” you might come across via the various social media will usually tell you wonderful things about yourself and terrible things about the people you hate. It will promise that the job offer or new boyfriend you dream of is just around the corner, as soon as Mercury ends its retrograde. This isn’t very good astrology.
“Still, Fred,” you might say, “You were just saying something about the universe noticing your first breath. How can something that tells you all the universe took notice of your specific birth be humbling?” As soon as you realize the universe took notice of everyone else’s first breath too. And the first breaths of all the cats, dogs, sea turtles, and cicadas. All the moments equally vital and thus equally normal. All the moments equal.
Some friends and I talked recently about the idea that life goes on in some way after death. I don’t have a strong belief in an afterlife, though I do feel a connection to some people who have died. The conversation reminded me of a question I had when I first started studying astrology, about whether or not anyone had done work with “death charts.” The symmetry of a death chart to correspond to a birth chart appealed to me. Death is its own kind of beginning, probably. But, it turns out, we have precedence in astrology to look at the birth chart long after the person for whom it was cast has died. A body’s death is not the same thing as the idea of that person dying. Whether you believe in a soul or afterlife or ghosts or anything happening after your body decomposes, you can’t help but remain an idea to be remembered. We continue on.
Time is nested, all the fibers of any given moment woven tightly across the seconds and the years, producing a texture that we can feel, but cannot alter, cannot untangle. When we sit down and look at an astrological chart, whether it’s the chart of a newborn baby, a geriatric cat, or a dead person, we are really meditating on the ways life is composed of a tangle of moments. We’re meditating on how that life moves, not out of the tangle or struggling against it, but within it, supported by those entwined moments. Think about the apparent mess of a root bulb, the ways that something simple and upright on the surface might sprawl underneath, circling back on itself, around obstacles, searching for what it needs by sensation and memory, inevitably finding it.
I don’t have much of an ancestral tradition. Not in the new age-y, white-person-copying-other-traditions way and not in the “I’m a tenth generation Texan and we all end up in the same plot of cemetery” way. I have Catholic traditions and prayer and the benefit of having grown up in a church that took Día de los Muertos seriously, but I’ve never made an altar of my own for the event. So I’ve spent a fair bit of time wondering: how does one work with ancestors? With the departed? With the once-was-human?
I’ve been thinking about the potential of the birth chart, that symbol of a beginning so far from their death. So this is an experiment, one you’re welcome to join in on, especially as we approach the shift into fall, a season that always feels close to the dead and gone. I’m going to be working with one or two people and their charts, using them as ways to be “in touch” with those people for the next month or two. I think my first experiment will be to do some focused remembering and contemplation when the Moon returns to its location in their natal charts. A little nod to the tradition of the Moon’s role as messenger between Earth and the outer spheres. I’ll keep y’all updated and hope that you’ll share any of your own experiments or thoughts about this with me too.
Thanks for reading and for being here! I’m not planning to write anything real about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I am curious if anyone has read particularly quality pieces about this. I’ve read a few that have made their way to my inbox and a few that friends have shared, but nothing has really captured the moment completely for me.
I don’t aspire to a world of violence of any kind, especially violence at a university or related to someone’s speaking on contentious issues. At the same time, I don’t think painting this as a simple “attack on free speech” is useful at all and have found some of the fingerwagging responses from liberals and some leftists to be confusing and incomplete at best. Anything good out there?
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
Thanks for the thoughts--they made me think differently than I usually do upon waking in the morning! Good to be aboard.